Your opinion on setting up a NAS/media server

In My Humble Opinion
1

When we moved to our present house last year, there was no room for an office (and I was retiring anyway), so I put my old office computer (Dell XPS 8900, 250 GB SSD, two 2 TB HDD, Windows 10) in the den and now use our 55-inch TV as a monitor on the relatively rare occasions when I need to use the computer in there. Most of the time, if I need something on it, I access it remotely from my laptop (Dell XPS 13) using Remote Utilities.

A while ago I got a notice that one of the hard disks might be failing, and my first impetus was to just replace them both with SSDs. But I don’t really need this machine anymore. It had some programs and data on it that I couldn’t easily migrate to the laptop, but that’s mostly taken care of now.

So my next thought was to scrap it and set up a NAS/media server, and migrate all the data on the Dell to the NAS and perhaps start ripping some of the 1,200+ DVDs I have in storage, because there’s no room for them in this tiny house.

As I started reading about setting up a NAS, I learned that I could just turn the computer into a NAS/media server. Cheaper, if not necessarily easier.

I don’t expect the media server to get very heavy use. There are only two of us, and generally we watch TV together. We have a few Echos throughout the house, so we might possibly be listening to two different audio streams at once, or one audio and one video.

The NAS will be used to store all the data on the old computer, all our photos, and to backup two laptops. Not a complicated setup.

What is your experience with any of these options, what lessons have you learned, what would you suggest I do?

2

Following this - I have a spare desktop that is currently not being used, it has room in the case for at least 3 more hard drives and I have all 2500 CDs ripped - but I have 3500 DVDs [my brother liked movies and television, and he had plastic and loved Amazon Prime free delivery!] that I could see ripping maybe 1000 of them onto a HDD for turning the spare computer into a media server for the house. We have a spare flatscreen monitor [um, 24 inch?] or we could use one of the 55 inch TVs we have as the media center - it is nicely internet able and we currently cut the cable and use it with Netflix, Amazon Prime and Youtube. I could see hooking the desktop up to it by wire, and we have a spare keyboard and trackman to use. Actually, I could see setting it up in the bedroom as a media center there. We spend most of the time hanging out in the master bedroom in that house anyway.

3

I highly recommend Synology. You can run Plex and other media servers and they have a simple user interface.

4

Once upon a time, I took a computer with a bunch of disks in it (I think there were 8), I installed FreeNAS on it, and… it worked (what did you expect)? The incremental hardware cost was zero since I already had the stuff, and the software was also free.

5

I have a dedicated NAS to run my PLEX server and am . . . moderately unhappy? It’s not a big deal, but some of these units go out of support much faster than others. Size factor wise though, it’s a huge advantage, but if I had a spare working mid sized tower, I’d probably repurpose it rather than buy a dedicated unit.

6

How did you use it? Only as a NAS, or was it a media server, too.

Thanks for the mention of FreeNAS. I’ll look into it. (Apparently it’s called TrueNAS now.)

7

It was not directly streaming or screencasting itself the way I had it set up; I had file shares on it that could be mounted under Windows or Linux, and then you could play files using the media player on the device you used to access it. Also, documents were automatically synced and backed up onto the server (which I also configured to store old versions for up to a year, in case something got deleted).

I could not tell you anything about the TrueNAS incarnation—but the FreeNAS version had a graphical interface to do all the system administration, like activate or deactivate services and plugins, configure datasets and storage volumes, etc. I would not describe it as completely “idiot-proof”—I remember one weird file permissions issue I had to figure out how to solve because I was trying to do something hacky—but I imagine the interface has been completely re-written from the ground up more than once since then.

8

I’ve been doing computers for forever so in my case i reused my old desktop as a home server. Serving files for your home is really not that complicated. Media streaming can be a bit more work, but most of it will be configuring stuff, which you’ll have to do in any solution.

That being said, if you go DIY, you’ll probably have to do it ALL yourself. If you’d buy a NAS there’s their waranty you can rely on and the packages will deliver you turnkey solutions for most of the things you can expect from a NAS.

So:

  • cheap and probably more powerfull, but more work = DIY,
  • setup & go, but more expensive = NAS
9

I was in a similar situation to consider brands and went with Synology after my research. Some other brands like Drobo have proprietary formats so if the box fails but the hard drives are fine, you need another Drobo to recover. Synology does have some proprietary formats, but you can reformat to RAID5 or RAID6 etc. The advantage of their format is it works better with unequal drive sizes.

Make sure you changed your Plex password recently, they had a leak.

10

Yep, changed it last week due to this.

11

I have three Synology NASs (two two-disk and one single-disk), but I still use an old Dell SFF PC and Plex as my media server. I find that the Synology units just aren’t up to transcoding videos in real-time and I don’t want to spend my time converting videos to the “right” format so they do.

OTOH, I’m limited to two 2TB SSDs in the Dell, but have 8TB each on the true NASs. I automatically sync the media files on the Dell to one of the NAS units each night.

12

I have a WD NAS, but I scrapped the WD operating system a few years ago and boot Debian from a USB connected SSD instead, and use the four drives as an MDADM array, which is what WD operating system did, plus some space to boot itself.

Obviously if you’re not comfortable administering a Linux system, this probably isn’t a good choice for you. For me, though, having control over all of the software versions and keeping my system up to date was worth it to dump official support from WD.

This really opened the door to me for using the NAS as the heart of the house. Aside from being an SMB server, it runs my Plex server; handles all of my home automation (it replaced my Mac mini with Indigo for Home Assistant instead); runs Pihole for whole house spam blocking; consolidates my Disney, Netflix, Prime, and Apple TV+ subscriptions for me (although I pay for these, my method is kind of extra-legal); and probably some other things I’m forgetting, like being a public receiver for the networked printer/scanner and a TimeMachine backup server.

The processor isn’t particularly advanced, Debian is fairly vanilla, but I did upgrade to 16GB. This was probably totally unnecessary, though, and free seems to confirm it for me.

I’m 50, and grew up without a GUI, so find myself not wanting to use things like FreeNAS, etc.

13

This is my setup, but with a single 8 bay Synology.

14

Ah, a tangentially related question:

From what I see, the main use of a media server such as Plex is to stream video and audio that’s on the device to other devices around the house.

But apart from things I filmed with my smartphones, 98% of the video content I have was obtained illegally. For music files, I have some that are legal downloads, and some that duplicate physical CDs I own; but most are BitTorrent downloads. If I wanted to store a Hollywood movie on a NAS so I could stream it to the living room, I wouldn’t know how to do it legally. Maybe I could crack a commercial DVD or Blu-Ray I own, I don’t even know if that’s legal where I live; but what’s the point of not using the original disc if I have it?

Netflix and Spotify, and presumably some other streaming services, allow downloading content for off-line consumption, but not in a format I could store on a media server, AFAIK.

So, in the end, in real life, do people use media servers mostly for illegal content?

(Note: I’m not asking for advice or methods for doing illegal acts. Just statistics or anecdotes.)

15

This is something of a hijack from my original post, but AFAIK, if you’ve bought the media in physical form (as I have for virtually all my music and video) and rip it onto your server, you are doing so legally. Although there may be some differences between the laws regarding music and video.

But I’d prefer to keep this conversation on the topic of actually setting up the hardware, and not devolve into a discussion of copyright. We have several thousand threads on that topic that can answer your question. Or start a new thread, if they don’t.

16

(In case anyone else was wondering, as I was: NAS = Network-attached storage. Not yet a household abbreviation, though it looks like no one else in this thread was unfamiliar)

17

Sorry, thanks for clarifying. My reasoning was that those most able to offer relevant advice would know what it means. But slightly inconsiderate to those who don’t.

18

I have gone through multiple iterations of this: started with a home brew no-frills installation of Linux and Samba, totally managed by editing config files on the command line. Moved on to FreeNAS, an excellent complete Linux distribution preconfigured with a web UI for managing disks.
Bought a Drobo in 2014, and it is alive to this day. When I started getting serious into video work at the start of the pandemic I bought a Synology.

I wouldn’t go the “roll your own” route unless you really are trying to save money.
Furthermore, I wouldn’t put just any old disks inside–use the ones designed for NAS such as Western Digital Red drives.
I really like my Drobo, but the sun seems to be setting in their world: I didn’t see new updates coming out and the most recently released machines were out of stock everywhere (pre-chip-shortage), both hints that they aren’t doing so well. Because you need a Drobo to retrieve data from a failed Drobo, I didn’t want to stay with them.

Synology seemed to be the best choice: the ability to create a NAS array from different-sized drives and the ability to just plug in another drive whenever necessary were top.
A Synology NAS is also a very capable server, able to run Plex, among many other things. Synology can run Docker, so you can have many little Linux things running inside Docker containers.

It’s one of those things where the cost is high, but you will know where your money went.

19

Agree. Just stick to the original issue.

As stated above, I still use a separate Dell SFF i7 (from eBay for $130) as the actual media server. I started out with the media files on a Synology “Media Server” NAS, but it had some problems with transcoding and often buffered the media unacceptably. This is not meant to be a criticism of the Synology unit. It otherwise performs absolutely perfectly and has saved my butt on a couple occasions when HDDs failed.

In my experience, the free Plex media server app has handled everything I’ve thrown at it, including 12+ GB MKV files with dozens of languages and subtitles. I generally stream to a Roku, but it works just as well streaming directly to a Samsung smart TV.

The three Synology NAS units in use are strictly for data and backups…with the exception of my music tracks. I have about 37K on one of them and they do handle those well.

20

Okay, because I’m a (virtually) complete newbiwle at this, if I use the PC as the media server, do my media files have to reside on that machine’s drives, or do I keep them on the NAS and simply use the PC’s processors to serve the data to my other devices?