• There has been a recent cluster of spammers accessing BARFer accounts and posting spam. To safeguard your account, please consider changing your password. It would be even better to take the additional step of enabling 2 Factor Authentication (2FA) on your BARF account. Read more here.

Plex / NAS / Media Server?

NorCalAthlete said:
Personally I'm not sure exactly how a NAS works vs a regular desktop but what about 1 SSD to run the system and a regular HDD to store everything? Some kind of hybrid system?
Click to expand...

I was thinking along those lines but with Raid 0 I don't think it would work since both drives operate simultaneously

And yes, someone mentioned it earlier, if the NAS isn't being asked for data the drives aren't spinning
 
NorCalAthlete said:
Personally I'm not sure exactly how a NAS works vs a regular desktop but what about 1 SSD to run the system and a regular HDD to store everything? Some kind of hybrid system?
Click to expand...

Generally an NAS is a linux server with no GUI. You can manage it remotley via a web browser, SSH/Telnet or via command line.

Yakoo752 said:
I was thinking along those lines but with Raid 0 I don't think it would work since both drives operate simultaneously

And yes, someone mentioned it earlier, if the NAS isn't being asked for data the drives aren't spinning
Click to expand...


Well, you'd generally RAID storage drives and not the drive with an OS. Performance benefits of a SSD for the OS on something as simple as an NAS are negligible and you'd be better off RAIDing for increased performance/drive size. I think for something like this, a RAID0 would be fine, as long as this isn't the sole backup of your music.
 
tzrider said:
Also, the data transfer rate of most SATA HDDs will exceed your network bandwidth by a lot.
Click to expand...

Not on a LAN network.

When we design show machines, our RAID0'ed SSDs are our biggest bottle neck by a long shot.

Even so, we are upgrading our show machines to 10gige and will be switching out to some 6 bay PCIe drives this year.
 
RightCoastBias said:
Not on a LAN network.

When we design show machines, our RAID0'ed SSDs are our biggest bottle neck by a long shot.

Even so, we are upgrading our show machines to 10gige and will be switching out to some 6 bay PCIe drives this year.
Click to expand...

I'm assuming OP is on a gigabit network or less. It's pretty easy to find a SATA drive that will push 6Gb/s. All of this is a couple orders of magnitude faster than you need to stream CD quality audio.
 
tzrider said:
I'm assuming OP is on a gigabit network or less. It's pretty easy to find a SATA drive that will push 6Gb/s. All of this is a couple orders of magnitude faster than you need to stream CD quality audio.
Click to expand...


Yeah, SATA III boards can push 6GB/s, but the SSD I/O speeds are still significantly lower.

Regardless, most of this is unlikely to be much of a concern for a home NAS, in my opinion.
 
I'm a huge Synology fan. The GUI is nice and they are ez to setup. Worked with other engineers who had used Drobos and they threw them away after they saw my Synology setup.
 
I do not know why I didn't do this sooner

I went with the Synology 216+

Assembled in 5 minutes
Went live in 5 minutes
Took 10 minutes to understand how to point iTunes and transfer the music
Took 15 minutes to transfer my music over
Took 10 minutes to setup the photo server for the wife and I

This is awesome!

Update took this long since it was back ordered
 
Last edited:
Yakoo752 said:
I do not know why I didn't do this sooner

I went with the Synology 216+

Assembled in 5 minutes
Went live in 5 minutes
Took 10 minutes to understand how to point iTunes and transfer the music
Took 15 minutes to transfer my music over
Took 10 minutes to setup the photo server for the wife and I

This is awesome!

Update took this long since it was back ordered
Click to expand...

What about movies and such? I've been keeping an eye out to see what you go with - I mainly download all my shows and movies, we use pandora / spotify for music. Not really sure what we should get for a setup but we're gonna drop the business line and go with a regular $50/month 150 Mbps residential line.
 
I haven't played on the movie side. That's territory I just don't know.

It plays and transcodes all my videos that I legitimately own. I can watch anything on any device and it scales accordingly.
 
NorCalAthlete said:
What about movies and such? I've been keeping an eye out to see what you go with - I mainly download all my shows and movies, we use pandora / spotify for music. Not really sure what we should get for a setup but we're gonna drop the business line and go with a regular $50/month 150 Mbps residential line.
Click to expand...

Plex server.
 
They'll advertise the capability, but Synologies aren't really fast enough to do legit transcodings. You'll find a lot of performance issues.

A full featured media system needs to be a PC. Mac minis with an external hard drive work really well as a powerful but low power solution.
 
mercurial said:
They'll advertise the capability, but Synologies aren't really fast enough to do legit transcodings. You'll find a lot of performance issues.

A full featured media system needs to be a PC. Mac minis with an external hard drive work really well as a powerful but low power solution.
Click to expand...

Currently running my Plex server off a Mac Mini with an external 4tb drive. I was concerned the 4tb drive would be too slow with the Mac Mini's USB 2.0, but so far no issues. But, my mini is running win 7, kind of a PC.

This along with the tracker I use having a good bookmarking system and RSS torrenting makes for a nice and easy set up. All the shows the lady and I watch just appear on Plex.
 
Last edited:
I debated on going the Mac mini route but wanted something more hot swappable.

I haven't played with the video side of the house since I don't torrent but all reviews say the 216+ is fully capable of 4K transcoding. Again, I haven't used it so I cant speak to it

The geofenced photo server is nice to have though
 
Last edited:
And it's dead -

Synology issued a firmware update - they then re-versioned it every other day. I had auto updates turned on and I became an early adopter

apparently it fubared the MOBO - I can't get it to respond

I reached out to get an RMA on April 26, they responded 3 days later asking for an invoice which I submitted and it's been a ghost town since...

I'll requested some follow up from them, Amazon only offers 30days so I hope they aren't playing that game otherwise I contest the charge through my credit card.

I've verified the hard drives are still good so there is that
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top