NAS recommendations?

[Janso]

I've got a Seagate Personal Cloud at the moment, but it isn't really beefy enough for what I need. I know I can expect to be spending in the hundreds on this but that's fine, I just want to know what I'm buying will do what I want.

Basically, I've got a load of DVDs ripped for the kids that I'd put onto the NAS I have for a Plex server I was going to run on it but as I say, it hasn't got the firepower to properly run it. I'm looking at the moment these:

Synology DS216PLAY
Synology DS216J
QNAP TS 253A
QNAP TS 251+

I'm primarily wanting to run a Plex server on this but would also like to use a DDNS and/or a VPN setup. Also interested to know if it's possible to share from the other NAS rather than having to prat about moving files between the two?

TIA

 

[trickpaul]

Synology stuff is usually decent, I run something like nas4free on it, it will spin up a plex server and allows remote access and run a vpn.

In the pass I wanted something like this, after going through a nas or few, decided to use run an old PC, bought one off ebay for £40 with 8gb memory, bought three hard drives ran them in raid for backup and ran openmediavault on it which has plugins for all the things you ask for.

I've had 5-6 streams running simultaneously with no issues all HD.

When you look at these nas units they are slow compared to pcs and the pcs are cheap compared to nas.

Also if you go down the PC route you could just take the hard drives out of the unit you have and put them in the pc.

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[Janso]

What kind of power usage is there having an old laptop running 24/7 though? Would prefer something purpose built but hadn't thought of that route.


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[ASHHBI]

QNAP TS 251+
I have had one of these for 12 months. Never missed a beat with storage, backups and runs Plex perfectly. It does loads more.

 

[Janso]

When you say loads more, are there any features you think are particularly useful? I was torn between that one and the DS216PLAY


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[trickpaul]

What kind of power usage is there having an old laptop running 24/7 though? Would prefer something purpose built but hadn't thought of that route.


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Using a small form factor pc with 8gb and one or two HD booting off a USB would probably be about £5 a month to run on power

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[Janso]

Interesting. Still haven't decided definitely what I'm going to do but that's worth bearing in mind.

Annoyingly, my Pi will convert the same files the NAS won't, so that tells me the Pi is more capable than something that cost about 6 times what I paid for it...

 

[trickpaul]

I did have a nas then a pc running openmediavault then I now use a pi2 running openmediavault with a USB3 HD attached, works well with 1080p multiple streams and I just use kodi as the media player, not tried 4k yet as pi is only 1080, but I do have an odroid c2 now as media player which is 4k so might try some 4k on it see how it plays locally and then over the network from the pi server.

Openmediavault has openvpn, plex, rsync, loads of pluggin, listed on Omv website

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[Janso]

Cheers, will take a look at that. That might've saved me a few quid...


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[trickpaul]

Cheers, will take a look at that. That might've saved me a few quid...


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It saved me £££££ pi £25, sd card £5, power £5, HD 2tb £90, Omv and kodi free! Total £125 for a personal server based on debian with multiple plugins.

I went down the odroid route as on the pi the USB and ethernet controller are on the same bus where as the odroid are separate and it also does 4k and has 2gb ram pi has 1gb, also odroid has a built in ir receiver

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[mbayley77]

I had a WD EX2 running PLEX but also found that this just wasn't up to the job of the PLEX server. It struggled to transcode some files and would be tempermental and often not show on the plex clients. I bought an old server. Quad core Xeon processor. It pulls 26 watts of power which is similar to my NAS. You can also set it up to auto switch off during the night if you wish it too saving some further electric. Remember that you need enough RAM to run the operating system but PLEX serving is CPU hungry so this should be the focus.