I’m a big fan of unraid but I will admit it’s overkill for a simple media server.
A synology NAS should be plenty powerful enough for most streaming needs so long as you’re willing to let your media transcode first and you’re not streaming to too many devices at once.
I use my unraid NAS to run sonar/radarr/readarr/prowlarr, stable diffusion, myjdownloader, a few vms and at one point even my lemmy instance. But honestly aside from stable diffusion and the VMs a synology NAS should have enough power to run a handful of other apps in addition to plex/jellyfin
A NAS serves data to clients; I know this is tilting conventional wisdom on it’s head but hear me out: go for the most inexpensive, lowest power storge-only-NAS that you can tolerate, and instead…put your money into your data transport (network) and into your clients..
As much as possible, simplify your life - move processing out of middle tiers, into client tiers.
I wouldn’t recommend a Synology NAS if you intend to stream content with Plex/Jellyfin. It simply lacks the horsepower most of the time. I should just go with a DIY solution, imo. If you just want to through components that you have lying around together, I would go with Unraid. Unraid doesn’t really care what you throw at it hardware wise.
I use xpenology on my old gaming rig as server (no GPU). And i love it. Had unraid before was also very good but diffrent. My main usage is to store Family Files and Photos and the best software ist Synology fotos for me.
Seconded. But for more details… it’s great because you can throw in many different drives of different sizes, unlike RAID servers where every drive has to be the same size. You can also specify however much you want to use as parity (backup) drives.
It has a nice web interface that you can access from any other PC on your LAN. I also have mine set up with Unraid Connect which allows me to access it from the open web also. It has a strong password and 2FA so I’m not concerned about security.
It also makes it easy to serve Docker containers and full blown VMs. You can set them up right in the UI, or you can also SSH to it and use it as a normal Linux OS if you’re a power user. The web UI also has a button that’ll launch a SSH terminal in a separate window too.
You can just use it as a NAS if you want, but Unraid makes it easy to expand your capabilities if you later feel like it. For example, you are only a few button clicks away from running Jellyfin to provide a nice UI for all your media files that you may be storing on your NAS.
Just throwing out an option, not saying it's the best:
If you are comfortable with Linux (or you want to be come intimately familiar with it), then you can just run your favorite distribution. Running a couple of docker containers can be done on anything easily.
What you're losing is usually the simple configuration GUI and some built-in features such as automatic backups. What you gain is absolute control over everything. That tradeoff is definitely not for everyone, but it's what I picked and I'm quite happy with it.
Yeah already quite familiar, already got a server but looking for something more premium, but essentially deliver the most easy platforms for the rest of the family to use.
Also, you could run Linux off of a real CPU. My experience is that my DS916+ is way underpowered even with 8 GB memory. I use my NAS for actual storage, and an old Intel mainboard w/16GB RAM for actual CPU work.
The most common software choices are TrueNAS and UNRAID.
Depending on your use-case, one is better than the other:
TrueNAS uses ZFS, which is great if you want to be absolutely sure the unreplaceable data on your disks is 100% safe, like your personal photos. UNRAID has a more flexible expansion and more power efficient, but doesn’t prevent any bit flip, which is not really an issue if you only store multimedia for streaming.
If you prefer a hardware solution ready to use, Synology and QNAP are great choices so long you remember to use ZFS (QNAP) or BTRFS (Synology) as filesystem.
Do either of them matter in terms of life of the hardisks? My server just had one of its HDDs reach EoL :| Kind of want to buy something that will last a very long time. Also, not familiar with ZFS, but read that Synology uses Butterfs - which always sounds good in my ears, been having a taste of the filesystem with Garuda on my desktop.
Yes, ZFS is commonly known for heavy disk I/O and also huge RAM usage, the rule used to be “1GB of RAM for every TB of disk” but that’s not compulsory.
Meanwhile, about BTRFS, keep in mind that Synology uses a mixed recipe because the RAID code of BTRFS is still green and it’s not considered production ready. Here’s an interesting read about how Synology filled the gaps: daltondur.st/syno_btrfs_1/
The only place ZFS seems to use a sizable amount of RAM is for the arc memory cache system which is an really nice feature when you have piles of small file access going on. For me some of the most high access things are the image stores for lemmy and mastodon that combine up to just under 200GB right now but are some crazy high number of files. Letting the system eat up idle ram to not have to pull all those from disk constantly is awesome.
Something kind of unique about UnRaid is the JBOD plus parity array. With this you can keep most disks spun down while only the actively read/written disks need to be spun up. Combine with an SSD cache for your dockers/databases/recent data and UnRaid will put a lot less hours(heat, vibration) on your disks than any raid equivalent system that requires the whole array to be spun up for any disk activity. Performance won’t be as high as comparably sized RAID type arrays, but as bulk network storage for backups, media libraries, etc. it’s still plenty fast enough.
Unraid 6.12 and higher has full support for ZFS pools. You can even use ZFS in the Unraid Array itself - allowing you to use many, but not all, of ZFS extended features. Self healing isn’t one of those features, though, it would be incompatible with Unraid’s parity approach to data integrity.
I just changed my cache pool from BTRFS to ZFS with Raid 1 and encryption, it was a breeze.
I generally recommend TrueNAS for projects where speed and security are more important than anything else and Unraid where (hard- and software-)flexibility, power efficiency, ease of use and a very extensive and healthy ecosystem are more pressing concerns.
Eh… TrueNAS UI basically takes care of any zfs learning curve. The main thing I’d note is that RAID 5 & 6 can’t currently be expanded incrementally. So you either need to use mirroring, configure the system upfront to be as big as you expect you’ll need for years to come, or use smaller RAID 5 sets of disk (e.g. create 2 raid 5 volumes with 3 disks each instead of 1 RAID 5 volume with 6 disks).
Not sure what you’re referring to as an easy backup option that zfs excludes, but maybe I’m just ignorant 🙂
I agree with the learning curve (personally I found it worthwhile, but that's subjective).
But how does ZFS limit easy backup options? IMO it only adds options (like zfs send/receive) but any backup solution that works with any other file systems should work just as well with ZFS (potentially better since you can use snapshots to make sure any backup is internally consistent).
Because you can’t use typical back product software. If you do it the right way, you’re using my ZFS send and receive to another machine running ZFS which significantly adds to cost.
That's an extremely silly reason not to use a specific tool: Tool A provides an alternative way to do X, but I want to do X with some other tool B (that'll also work with tool A), so I won't be using tool A.
Send/receive may or may not be the right answer for backing up even on ZFS, depending on what exactly you want to achieve. It's really nice when it is what you want, but it's no panacea (and certainly no reason to avoid ZFS, since its use it 100% optional).
I really don’t get your meaning of my apparent silly reason. You can’t use Acronis, Veeam, or other typical backup products with ZFS. My point is this is a barrier to entry. I disagree that it’s not silly for a home user to build another expensive NAS just to do ZFS send and receive which would be the proper way.
I run most of my stuff on k8s, but I really enjoy simple docker ecosystem of apps that home assistant supervisor provides. Unraid app approach looks similar, preconfigured and working together. Even thou I don’t need fancy nas, I might try unraid just to evaluate apps ecosystem. How to u find their community apps?
I usually search thru the apps and they install as docker containers, I can edit the configs after the fact, it’s pretty nice. There’s also a terminal so I can run regular docker commands too.
Unraid is also awesome for places with high energy cost: Unlike with your typical RAID / standard NAS, it allows you to spin down all drives that aren’t in active use at a relatively minor write speed performance penalty.
That’s pretty ideal for your typical Plex-server where most data is static.
I built a 10HDD + 2SSD Unraid Server that idles at well below 30W and I could have even lowered that further had I been more selective about certain hardware. In a medium to high energy cost country, Unraid’s license cost is compensated by energy savings within a year or two.
Mixing & matching older drives means even more savings.
Simple array extension, single or dual parity, powerful cache pool tools and easily the best plugin and docker app store make it just such a cool tool.
I got burned pretty bad by QNAP. Their TS-453 Pro had an Intel manufacturing defect that basically caused it to die prematurely and QNAP has basically given up all responsibility for it. I built my own NAS after that experience.
It’s fine, but it’s really only good as a NAS. BHyve is a terrible virtualization platform. With something like Open Media Vault you get access to KVM, which is a much better way to run a virt or two on the side.
You’re one of the few who mentioned OMV in the thread and I was wondering why, it works great for me as a VM on proxmox… the only gripe I have is that sometimes the GUI decides I’ve made changes to the configuration and asks me to apply them, only to fail and get stuck with the notification.
Do you have any old hardware that doesn’t have a job? That is a great place to start. Take some time try out different solutions (proxmox, unraid, casa OS). Then as you nail down your needs you can better pick hardware.
First I chose a Pi now am using a Nuc as a NAS.
Reason for why: The price was too much for a synology + transcode capable CPU as it wasmt clear what type of processor was being used.
Can definitely confirm this. I started with a Proxmox system which had a TrueNAS VM. TrueNAS just used a USB HDD for storage though. Setting everything up and getting the permissions set correctly so I could connect my computers was a pain in the ass though.
Later I bought a synology and it just works. Only thing I would recommend is getting good HDDs. I bought Toshiba MG08 16TB drives and while they work great, they are obnoxiously loud during read and write operations. They are so loud, that even though the NAS is in a separate room I have to shut it off at night.
Meanwhile the Seagate Ironwolf drive I used for TrueNAS was next to my bed for multiple months and was basically silent.
If you want a “setup and forget” type of experience, synology will serve you well, if you can afford it. Of you are more of a tinkerer and see yourself experimenting and upgrading in the future, then I recommend custom built. OMV is a solid OS for a novice, but any Linux distro you fancy most can do the job very well!
I’ve started my NAS journey with a very humble 1-bay synology. For the last few years I am using a custom built ARM NAS (nanopi m4v2), with 4-bays and running Armbian. All my services run on docker, I have Jellyfin, *arr, bitwarden and several other servicies running very reliably.
^ This. I have an M1 Mac mini running Asahi Linux with a bunch of docker containers and it works great. Run Jellyfin off of a separate stick PC running an Intel Celeron with Ubuntu Mate on it. Basically I just have docker compose files on those two machines and occasionally ssh in from my phone to sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y (on Ubuntu) or sudo pacman -Syu (on Asahi) and then docker compose pull && docker compose up -d
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