NAS and Plex Questions/Suggestions

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
Hey all. I had some questions and wanted your guys input/speculations on this. I do work in enterprise storage, specifically with NAS servers actually, but am a little less familiar on the consumer side.

Currently I have a 4 bay QNAP TS 412, that is pretty old but still working fine. It's got 4x2TB in RAID 5 for about 5.5TB usable. I almost exclusively use the NAS for Plex, but have Plex running on my desktop directly, not the NAS.


I recently purchased what I thought was a higher end old NAS from a friend but it ended up being dead (No POST) and had water damage. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I'm pretty much stuck with what I got for $160. I have pulled out the 7x2TB drives it came with and am slowly working thru testing them via a USB docking station. I anticipate most if not all of them will be good and reusable as the NAS did actually fire up and all drives spun, but it would not POST. 2 are WD Red NASware 2.0 drives dated 2014, and the other 5 are WD Blacks dated 2011. I intend to repurpose 4 of these drives for another NAS, and sell any remaining working ones.

My current NAS, due to limitations I can't quite recall exactly, is hard locked at running SMB 1.0, which is to say I'm capped at a transfer speed of about 15MB/s. This is insufficient for true 4K streams and I ultimately want a higher speed NAS to push 4K to my TV via the Plex app. A few titles work, but it really is dependent on bitrate if it can keep up or get stuck buffering. The interface is also pretty sluggish, but to be expected with 256mb RAM.

What I'm wanting to do is buy a new 4 bay NAS that I can put these older drives into, then slowly copy across my ~3TB of... ahem... legally acquired content. Once this is done I will likely rotate out the drives one by one for bigger drives to increase capacity. From my understanding this is possible, but is one of my questions.

My questions.
1. Any suggestions on 4 BAY NAS? Preferred brand? I really don't need a whole lot of features as I intend to keep Plex running on my desktop and just use the NAS as storage. I do like my QNAP, as it's basically just a Linux box. Don't have a hard budget but not trying to drop more than ~$500. I also am unsure if I should wait for prices to drop or stabilize as I'm in no real rush on this project.
2. Is it possible/feasible to copy everything over to the new NAS from the old, then slowly rotate out disks to eventually increase storage? I think this is possible with most if not all NAS boxes these days, but not something I've done before. I believe I would need to change every disk out to a bigger capacity before I can expand it, as all partitions in RAID need to be the same size.
3. Any other suggestions/thoughts? If I had done this properly, I would have just bought bigger drives to start, but was suckered into this deal with the 7 Bay one that is dead and now a bunch of older 2TB drives. I looked at bigger NAS options with more slots but they just seem pointlessly expensive past 4 bays.
4. It's not possible to just yank my current 4 drives and throw them in another NAS is it? I feel like that's a horrible idea but wanted to ask :D
 

strollin

Well-Known Member
I have a Plex media server that currently houses just shy of 14K movies. I don't use a NAS, I just use a dedicated desktop machine which does a great job. I started out with a WD NAS but found it really lacked horsepower when attempting to transcode movies on the fly. I use a tall tower case which has room for at least 6 drives (currently use 4 drives to store my movies and use an SSD as boot drive).
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
I thought about building out a whole server but don't really want to spend the money on it or have the space. The NAS itself doesn't require that much power on its own since my desktop does the heavy lifting.

14k movies? Sheesh. That would take years to acquired I feel like.
 

voyagerfan99

Master of Turning Things Off and Back On Again
Staff member
I wouldn't cap yourself to a 4-bay if you can afford it. I run Synology myself and am happy with it. The main NAS that stores my Plex data is a DS918+ but I think those are end of sale.
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
I wouldn't cap yourself to a 4-bay if you can afford it. I run Synology myself and am happy with it. The main NAS that stores my Plex data is a DS918+ but I think those are end of sale.
It would be kinda nice to use all these drives I have now and prevent the need for buying bigger ones as soon. I'm actually finding the drives I did get have pretty minimal on time hours considering their age and are enterprise drives so probably good for awhile. Only been able to test 2 of them so far... takes forever.

I might look at a bigger one then. You ever have to engage with support on these? I know my way around NAS's pretty well so I'm not super worried about that but do see people complain about QNAP on Amazon reviews for that.
 

voyagerfan99

Master of Turning Things Off and Back On Again
Staff member
My DS918+ died just outside of the warranty period a few months ago and Synology still replaced the unit for me which I really liked.

The reason I say you should get more than 4 bays is so you can just add disks and expand the array instead of swapping disks and then expanding.
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
My DS918+ died just outside of the warranty period a few months ago and Synology still replaced the unit for me which I really liked.

The reason I say you should get more than 4 bays is so you can just add disks and expand the array instead of swapping disks and then expanding.
Yeah I get that. I guess it's just a matter of running with a lot of older 2TB's or springing for bigger drives like 6TB or similar. I still have 2TB free in my current setup so more bays might be the logical option.

Edit: Looking at this now...


I would guess this has enough power to just run Plex natively, which would be nice if I'm spending this much.
 
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beers

Moderator
Staff member
Damn I thought I hit post reply on this a couple days ago but it was still in my draft.

I wouldn't think that SMBv1 would limit you to 15 MB/sec, did you try to leverage any other protocols on that ?

1) Go with what you're familiar with but if you want quicksync/etc here's the compatibility table:
2) Probably, 3x RAID5 and then expanding, but you'd need a long time to resilver each step.
3) I'd probably second the larger bay variant, but also can't talk because I bought a DS220j. The 8 bay would give you a lot of flexibility moving forward (8x 16TB anyone?). That's about the split where an actual server starts making more sense for a similar cost, although you start losing convenience and efficiency.
4) You might be able to get away with something similar to that, on most Linux setups you can move a md volume between different platforms and stuff seamlessly, it all depends.
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
I honestly can't recall exactly why I was throttled but I know SMB version was a factor and I fought with it for several days before giving up.

Looking pretty hard at that DS1621+.
 

Intel_man

VIP Member
You might want to do some research on how AMD's perform on Plex encoding/transcoding. Surfing the web suggests the AMD Ryzen V1500B should transcode at 1080p fine but does not meet the criteria for 4K.

Intel Quick Sync is a relatively big boost on Plex which you might want to consider... even though Intel hasn't come out with anything (processors) great in the past 5 years on the NAS front.
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
@Intel_man I'll check into that. I did see one review/demo of it doing 4k in real time but I'll look into it further. I'm not brand allegiant here, whatever works.
 

Intel_man

VIP Member
Yea, I don't really care about brand allegiance too, it's just something Plex in particular can be very picky about. I was on that same boat when it came to researching about NAS's and Plex.

Documentation on what works and what doesn't appear pretty sporadic too which always makes it fun to figure out... :confused:
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
Is it safe to assume I'm going to need Plex Pass to do this properly? It's only 40/year which is no big deal, but was curious if you guys have had to use that.

I think I'm going to swing that DS1621+ after 4th of July weekend.
 

voyagerfan99

Master of Turning Things Off and Back On Again
Staff member
Is it safe to assume I'm going to need Plex Pass to do this properly? It's only 40/year which is no big deal, but was curious if you guys have had to use that.

I think I'm going to swing that DS1621+ after 4th of July weekend.
There's never any requirement to buy a Plex Pass, but you get some extra features when you have it.

 

Intel_man

VIP Member
Plex usually sends me deals to buy a lifetime license for $75 once every year or so... Wait for that if you want those perks.

If you don't plan on using Plex to share your movie collection to anyone or watch on your phone, I wouldn't worry about Plex Pass too much.
 
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