NAS Servers

Foler · Feb 9, 2019

Looking to purchase a synology nas server. Building is an option but honestly with my limited time I need something that can be setup real fast and requires minimal time for me.

Primary purchase is data archiving and storage. Looking at either the Synology DS1618+ and DS1819+. I don't foresee myself needing any more than 24tb of data storage in the next few years. I'd like some redundancy since this is archiving important information. Debating which model to get and what raid setup to go with and whether or not to have one hot swappable available. I'm not super worried about rebuild time if a disk fails as long as it's not like 2+ days.. I'll also probably back it up using backblaze b2 just for more redundancy.

I'm thinking maybe 6 bay 4tb drives in raid 6 with no hot swappable? It's archived data so I don't think I'll need it on the fly but maybe the convenience of 1 hot swap would be worth it.

So it's between these two synology models, one is 6 bay the other 8 bay. Most likely going with WD red's, can't decide on size because of the rebuild time factor, more is always better but larger disk = longer rebuild times it seems.

Any suggestions appreciate. Thanks.

ZyyzYzzy · Feb 9, 2019

Upgrading the Database(TM)?

loudgas · Feb 9, 2019

I think Synology makes quality products and are priced better than their competitors. That said, both those units are expensive for nothing more than a low powered PC with drive expansion.

My setup is Xpenology on a Thinkcentre M82, a 4bay hotswap (4x2.5" in a 5.25" drive bay), and 2 mediasonic usb3 8bay enclosures, I also added a dual port gigabit nic and bonded all 3 nic's. All in I probably paid 3-400.

Drives will cost the same.

Arative · Feb 9, 2019

I have a qnap ts451 I'm pretty happy with. I just upgraded the ram from 2gb to 8gb

alavaz · Feb 9, 2019

Your rebuild time will be like 5 days with 4TB disks in a raid 6. You definitely want a hot swap if you go with density like that.

Memset

taebin · Feb 10, 2019

Arative said:
I have a qnap ts451 I'm pretty happy with. I just upgraded the ram from 2gb to 8gb

I have the exact same model. Getting annoyed by relatives/neighbors streaming Plex and killing the stream due to transcoding. I could optimize everything, but lazy. How hard was swapping it out?

Alasliasolonik · Feb 10, 2019

You cant afford a $200 router but yet another question...

Arative · Feb 10, 2019

taebin said:
I have the exact same model. Getting annoyed by relatives/neighbors streaming Plex and killing the stream due to transcoding. I could optimize everything, but lazy. How hard was swapping it out?

It wasn't too terribly difficult. Its located behind the drive bays, so you have to remove those but it's only 4 screws if I remember right.

Foler · Feb 10, 2019

Alasliasolonik said:
You cant afford a $200 router but yet another question...

I can afford a $200 router. Doesn't mean I need a $200 router. Went with a Synology ds1618+ and 6x 4tb WD red's. Prob gonna do SHR.

Void · Feb 11, 2019

I only just saw this, so a little late, but I have had the 8-bay, plus 2x 5-bay extensions, for probably 10 years. I have only had one issue (besides 2 disks failing over those years), and customer support was able to fix it for me over remote access. I use the SHR option as well. And the WD reds, currently 3TB for all (upgraded from 1TBs years ago).

It can take several days to rebuild if you don't have a hot-swap drive (I don't), but seeing as how I've only had to do it twice in all that time, I'm ok with that. It isn't anything critical that I can't do without for a couple of days (movies, music, porn, etc.).

I would buy Synology again in a heartbeat. I think you will be very happy with your purchase.

Foler · Feb 15, 2019

Void said:
I only just saw this, so a little late, but I have had the 8-bay, plus 2x 5-bay extensions, for probably 10 years. I have only had one issue (besides 2 disks failing over those years), and customer support was able to fix it for me over remote access. I use the SHR option as well. And the WD reds, currently 3TB for all (upgraded from 1TBs years ago).

It can take several days to rebuild if you don't have a hot-swap drive (I don't), but seeing as how I've only had to do it twice in all that time, I'm ok with that. It isn't anything critical that I can't do without for a couple of days (movies, music, porn, etc.).

I would buy Synology again in a heartbeat. I think you will be very happy with your purchase.

Thanks void.

Just got my 1618+ in yesterday. Liking it so far. 6x WD reds are so quiet. It seems very robust in features. Kinda annoying to setup the way I want, UX could be way improved. It's a small complaint though.

Are you backing yours up to a cloud service? Tried connecting it to back blaze b2 yesterday and had issues, I'm sure it's something dumb.

Any cool features I should look into? Workflow improvements?

I use a MBP, win10 laptop, rasp pi, and Ubuntu VM. Gonna connect time machine and windows 10 backup to it for one. The main purpose of this was backup and storage but if it can improve my workflow I'd like to explore other uses. Primarily doing programming between all these devices syncing with Dropbox/git and also doing multimedia editing.

Void · Feb 15, 2019

I am not backing it up to any cloud service, as the stuff I'm putting on it, while a pain in the ass to lose, is all fairly replaceable. Also, last I looked (which was years ago), backing up that much data was prohibitively expensive for me. I'm not sure what the cost would be now though. What are you looking to back up, TB-wise, and how much are you expecting it to cost on back blaze, if you don't mind me asking?

However, as I'll get into below, I am backing it up to an extent.

You already are doing far more with your computers than I am, so I'm afraid that I can't really offer any workflow advice, but maybe someone else can. The extent of my use of the Synology for anything more than just RAID storage is utilizing the Synology Sync utility to sync the movie/tv/music portion of my NAS to a server that I bought with grand designs, but now is literally nothing but a Plex bitch for my friends. I have two copies of those folders (which is a massive amount) because I'm selfish and picky, and I don't want to have to watch downgraded Plex versions of my stuff (because the server is in another location) like my friends have to. Aside from a few glitches here and there, Synology Sync is very easy to use and seems to work mostly flawlessly.

loudgas · Feb 15, 2019

Plex runs very nicely on Synology/XPenology
I also use it for the surveillance software to record from my IP security cameras
There is a plethora of options with the Docker add-on which I'm just scratching the surface on
The Office app is nice too

taebin · Feb 19, 2019

As mentioned earlier, I have a QNAP TS-451. The processor is fairly limited (Intel Celeron 2.4Ghz Dual Core). I've invited some friends/relatives to use our Plex, and they are all using various Roku models to stream remotely. I stream locally to Roku Premiere+'s. For the majority of my media, the QNAP has to transcode the audio because these Roku's don't recognize the codec the media is encoded in. If there are multiple streams going on with multiple transcoding, shit comes to a screeching halt.

Reading up on this, it doesn't sound like a RAM upgrade is gonna make any difference as the bottleneck is CPU. Plex offers hardware transcoding if you have a Plex Pass membership, but I don't think this model even supports it. I have about 7TB of media stored on it, mostly in 1080p format. Anyone have recommendations or past experience around this?

My options as I see them:

1) Download my entire library locally and use Handbrake to change the encode. Letting Plex try and Optimize on the NAS takes about 2 hours per movie and I would kill myself.
2) Flip my Roku Premiere's for Roku Ultra's, and hope they do a better job of recognizing the encodes.
3) Buy a better NAS.
4) Kick my friends/relatives off my Plex.

1 would be the cheapest, but most time consuming. 2 I'm unsure if the Ultra's would perform any better. 3 just seems a waste of money. 4 will annoy relatives.

Captain Suave · Feb 20, 2019

taebin said:
As mentioned earlier, I have a QNAP TS-451. The processor is fairly limited (Intel Celeron 2.4Ghz Dual Core). I've invited some friends/relatives to use our Plex, and they are all using various Roku models to stream remotely. I stream locally to Roku Premiere+'s. For the majority of my media, the QNAP has to transcode the audio because these Roku's don't recognize the codec the media is encoded in. If there are multiple streams going on with multiple transcoding, shit comes to a screeching halt.

Reading up on this, it doesn't sound like a RAM upgrade is gonna make any difference as the bottleneck is CPU. Plex offers hardware transcoding if you have a Plex Pass membership, but I don't think this model even supports it. I have about 7TB of media stored on it, mostly in 1080p format. Anyone have recommendations or past experience around this?

My options as I see them:

1) Download my entire library locally and use Handbrake to change the encode. Letting Plex try and Optimize on the NAS takes about 2 hours per movie and I would kill myself.
2) Flip my Roku Premiere's for Roku Ultra's, and hope they do a better job of recognizing the encodes.
3) Buy a better NAS.
4) Kick my friends/relatives off my Plex.

1 would be the cheapest, but most time consuming. 2 I'm unsure if the Ultra's would perform any better. 3 just seems a waste of money. 4 will annoy relatives.

If you've got an operable hardware set from an old system you could move Plex to that and keep the storage on your NAS. Right now I've got my NAS set up with low-power hardware and a beefier intel NUC that runs Plex transcoding. An old laptop (wired) or whatever would do just as well.

taebin · Feb 21, 2019

Captain Suave said:
If you've got an operable hardware set from an old system you could move Plex to that and keep the storage on your NAS. Right now I've got my NAS set up with low-power hardware and a beefier intel NUC that runs Plex transcoding. An old laptop (wired) or whatever would do just as well.

Thanks for the suggestion, hadn't thought of that. But if I run Plex off an unused PC, doesn't the NAS have to transfer the file to the PC for transcoding, then the transcoded version go to the output source? Seems like adding another transport step in the process. Faster transcoding by the better processor, but more shipping the media around.

Void · Feb 21, 2019

taebin said:
Thanks for the suggestion, hadn't thought of that. But if I run Plex off an unused PC, doesn't the NAS have to transfer the file to the PC for transcoding, then the transcoded version go to the output source? Seems like adding another transport step in the process. Faster transcoding by the better processor, but more shipping the media around.

Your "server" would be the PC now, so it would be the output source. It wouldn't need to send back to the QNAP. The time it takes to get the file from the NAS is negligible (unless you've got some really terrible 1980s networking I suppose) compared to the transcoding time.

I'm assuming that you are already optimizing the source file formats? Like, if you're sending 720p out to your viewers, you aren't downloading the 1080p version? It cuts down a ton on transcoding if it isn't doing anything but just converting the format. I have that issue, because I download 4K to watch in all its glory, but I only let my friends/relatives see 720p. Currently none of my devices, even my server, are capable of doing that transcode without bringing everything to a screeching halt, so I have had to download lesser quality versions of stuff I know they will want to watch alongside my 4K versions. Even when I label them, they still try the 4K more often than not, but that's a retard problem, not a hardware problem.

Captain Suave · Feb 21, 2019

taebin said:
Seems like adding another transport step in the process. Faster transcoding by the better processor, but more shipping the media around.

Yes, but unless your network runs on carrier pigeons the transport won't be the limiting factor compared to transcoding.

Denamian · Feb 21, 2019

Captain Suave said:
If you've got an operable hardware set from an old system you could move Plex to that and keep the storage on your NAS. Right now I've got my NAS set up with low-power hardware and a beefier intel NUC that runs Plex transcoding. An old laptop (wired) or whatever would do just as well.

This is how my Plex server is set up. I have the server itself running on an old Dell workstation and the media on a QNAP TS-251, which is just the 2 bay version of the 451.

ToeMissile · Feb 23, 2019

I do it as well, but with a shittier NAS - 3tb WD mycloud. Run plex on a tiny little Lenovo machine with an i5 3470T and 4 gb ram. Don't really dl any 4k content though. Bought both used for about $300 total, can't really complain.

NAS Servers

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