I’m new to the idea of a NAS and building one but not to building computers and networking.
My goal in to get a NAS system up and running at my home so I can run Plex on it’s own system not my windows desktop.
I’m willing to by new or used hardware and would like to re-use the 16TB drive I recently added to the PC to store my media files if possible. I know that this drive will likely need formatted from NTFS to use it in a trueNAS build which has me worried a little.
I think what I’m asking here is what are the Hardware recommendations to get something that will work well for plex and backing up some documents. And also if there is any good tutorials that I should read/watch to learn from.
As a neighborly nearly nescient NAS novice myself, it’s necessarily needed to narrow notable needs and nice-to-haves to nurture new nonstop network norms.
That is to say, alliteration aside, I’m currently going through the final steps of building a system myself and can walk you through some of the things that took me weeks to figure out by reading old forum posts and can help get you started. I find setting things up as questions to be answered can really help with the planning process to help you build something that won’t quickly be outgrown.
What is the goal of your system and what future scope creep or expansion do you expect? That is, please define what you want your NAS to do besides Plex, if anything, and a ballpark estimate of how much larger you expect your Plex library to grow on, erring on the higher end of things.
What is your system and drive budget?
Before planning to reuse the 16Tb drive in your new NAS and building a pool around that size, have you checked if its a CMR or SMR drive? SMR drives tend to experience issues when used in a NAS but are less expensive to purchase. Also, a pool can only add as much per drive as the smallest capacity drive in the pool. If you want to mix and match drive sizes at the expense of transfer speeds there are alternatives such as Unraid.
How important is the data on your drives? If the answer is extremely, then you may want a CPU/Mb combo supporting ECC.
What are power costs in your area? Certain CPUs are optimized for extreme power efficiency while some, namely certain server chips, tend to be power hogs with outstanding speed. Others are more balanced.
One may assume you want transcoding due to a Plex focus, but do you already have a GPU or do you plan to use a CPU with decent transcoding?
How many users do you plan to have access your server? This may affect your suggested networking card.
What level of redundancy do you want? RAIDZ1 allows for two drive failures before data is lost, but RAIDZ1 or a simple mirror can get you started with just two drives.
Do you plan to have an offsite backup? Some individuals reserve a pool to swap an encrypted backup with another person, often family in another state in case of something crazy like a wildfire destroying one of the home servers.
Thanks
For the reply
I’m not sure how fast my Plex collection will grow. I started in 2018 with just a 2 Tb drive and have recently outgrew the 4TB I upgraded to in 2020. I already have over 25% of the 16TB used. So I feel I have a few years to grow with that storage and I could save some space by encoding some recorded TV from mpeg2 to h.264.
2. I’m trying to budget as little as possible for this but I have feeling it is going to cost me $500 plus if I find a used computer I can build it with or over $1000 for all new hardware.
3. The mechanical drives I have now are Sea gate Ironwolf drives, I checked and they are CMR drives. I started to by those for the computer with the idea they would be more durable for constant use than a desktop drive.
4. The data is importance but not life critical. I was backing up to a removable drive and storing that in my office at work several times a year so if there was a major failure I’d still have most of my media collection to restore.
5. Power is like $0.11/Kwhr here. and my power use now is not too bad. I’d like something that isn’t a total power hog still.
6. Yes, trans coding is important but most of my plex use is in the house when used for video and I only have two regular users. I do use it remotely with plex amp for play music on the go but that’s not very CPU or bandwidth intense use. I was looking at intel i5 CPUs and boards with integrated graphics, but Will consider AMD too.
7. 2 users . I do share my library with a few friends though they don’t used it much.
8. Redundancy is where I have a lot of questions about set up. My initial thought was a simple mirror was fine. I actually want to know how many drives I’d need for raidZ1 and how much storage would I get with the required number of drives If I used all 16Tb drives
9. my current off site back up is just an external drive I copy my files to a few time a year and store at work.
I’m going to read the Hub, thanks for the link.
Hopefully I can work up a path the get a server going mostly for Plex. but I have also seen NextCloud is a thing of interest.
It sounds like, for now, you can avoid a high capacity, $200-range, case like the Meshify 2 XL and Define 7 XL. A mid-sized case like the Node 804 (10 3.5" drive capacity) would work, but personally, go for reusing an old chassis for now to save money until you really need a large setup. As long as you’re fine with ATX you could technically even reuse an old beige box sitting in a basement after replacing the internals and improving airflow somewhat. I’ve seen an old beige box that could hold 5 HDDs, so if the case is free it won’t hurt. Just keep in mind that you will outgrow it eventually, but that will likely be years away. Buying high capacity refurbished drives can help keep initial costs low, being roughly 60% the price of a new list price 18Tb last I checked, but consider using RAIDZ2 in case of premature failure.
Some measures to keep storage managed include setting up deduplication for backups and, as you noted, transcoding media. There’s a setting for ZFS compression you can make sure is kept on for some additional reductions but I could not tell you the specifics of how much that would help.
Easily, and even before buying any drives if you’re not careful and want latest or last gen parts. There’s a $90 premium per stick for 32Gb of Gen5 ECC RAM over non-ECC alone and it also only runs at 4800Mhz vs the gamer brand variety that’s both cheaper and can go at a greater clockspeed. Gen 4 RAM has ECC at a very modest premium, but do check a motherboard carefully to see which it supports as Intel 12-14th can support either depending on which motherboard you use. ECC doesn’t sound strictly necessary for your usecase, though. Do note that if you use an Intel 12-14 Gen CPU you will need a W680 chipset motherboard to actually use it. AMD is more forgiving in that regard, but also currently worse for Plex/Jellyfin based on what I’ve read.
If you’re on a really tight budget you may be better off repurposing an old desktop and putting as many HDDs inside as it supports, possibly with the appdata and metadata saved to a SSD. The good news is that there was a recent update that added full RAIDz expansion so you can just add drives as things fill up rather than needing a new VDEV or backing up, destroying, and recreating the pool. Note, that there may be some lost capacity due to old parity data that then needs a script run to tidy up.
That was good forward thinking there. My own family saved a few dollars getting SMR to backup things, but we can’t shuck its case and just use it in the NAS now.
In that case, Epyc and Xeon server chips seem like they’re somewhat out of the picture although apparently there are some exceptions there.
That sounds right. Intel had a reputation for years as being better for Plex, so that’s probably what you should go with as that’s your primary reason for making a NAS. Still, AMD has apparently exceeded Intel in performance in the top of the line consumer and server market segments this generation of CPUs, supports UDIMM ECC on consumer market CPUs without a special motherboard chipset, and apparently now even has somewhat decent iGPUs, albeit ones that still don’t play nice with Plex. It’s worth keeping an eye on. I’d recommend using a cheap or several generations old Intel desktop computer and putting TrueNAS on that until you outgrow it which is likely a matter of years and will also get you familiar with things with lower stakes than a system with over $1000 in new parts. Facebook marketplace or Craigslist may have a cheap system.
That said, I will note this gem from Jellyfin’s site: "Intel 10th gen and older integrated graphics are losing support for QSV on Linux due to the SDK for these platforms being deprecated by Intel. If you own 7-10th gen CPUs with integrated graphics, please continue to use them for Jellyfin. If you are making a purchase decision, please choose a newer CPU if you plan on using Intel integrated graphics."Hardware Selection | Jellyfin
In that case, it’s arguable if you even need a 10Gbe expansion card if your Mb supports 1 or 2.5 Gigabit and you don’t have many simultaneous users. Plus, there’s the question of if your router supports those speeds and if it would need an upgrade as well. Some people use switches for more effective throughput, but I’m currently planning a direct router connection myself.
Here we get to the what’s arguably the best news of your evening; As of just three months ago the official release of RAIDz expansion was put in the official, non-nightly build release. This means you can in theory start a RAIDz1 array with just two drives just like a mirror and expand as you fill up space, which makes things nearly as convenient as Unraid. There are some minor catches such as old parity data needing to be cleaned out via a script to prevent lost storage overhead and the remaining requirement that disks in a single pool can only be the as large in usable capacity as the smallest drive in the pool. Feel welcome to double check with a more experienced networker on the site with any of the suggestions as I haven’t even finished building mine yet. Still, repurposing an older desktop and going bare metal TrueNAS until you have enough data to justify a dedicated, purpose-built system seems prudent as technology is always improving and your current requirements are low.
I apologize for not cleaning up my response as much as my initial post; a close relative died two days ago and I’m helping with the visitation. Facial recognition on images comes in rather handy to run off large numbers of photo prints quickly. I’m definitely putting Immich on my system once the parts finish arriving. For the record, I managed to build it well under $1000 before the HDDs by mixing in preowned components including the case itself.
