I want to make a plex nas so I don’t have to deal with Netflix and streaming services, here are some questions I have.
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What NAS should I get? I’ve heard Qnap is good, but I want to know around what nas I should get
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Is plex somewhat simple to setup and is there other software I should look at?
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Is there anything else I should know?
So I‘m a Synology user for years (currently a DS921+ with a DX517 extension) and use it mainly to store movies/shows.
For you here are some things that might be useful to know:
- Consumer NAS are massively underpowered in terms of CPU and RAM. Both is needes if you run a few Docker containers. Especially the transcoding of media files is very CPU intensive.
- using a very small „compute“ node, like an Intel NUC, takes care of this problem. I run all Docker containers on this one, while I use the NAS only as storage.
- Consumer NAS are super easy to setup and also to scale, in case you need more diskspace.
- I was never a big fan of Plex for various reasons. I use Emby and I‘m very happy about it. I also hears many good things about Jellyfin
Build a basic i5 desktop.
It’ll cost less, be much faster and easier to upgrade; the “NAS” platform is so overrated.
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Depends on how much you want to spend on your own setup. Unraid, while paid, is brain dead easy.
Or AMD 6000 series if power draw and quietness are important. Add Proxmox with ZFS to run all your apps in containers or VMs.
For something like a Plex server, Intel is better because of QSV.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers Plex Brand of media server package RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SBC Single-Board Computer VPN Virtual Private Network k8s Kubernetes container management package
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in addition to “dedicated Nas + compute node” and “just use a desktop” suggestions, there’s the microserver option in between. Small, but has enough power to run stuff other than storage.
Hp proliant microserver is what I use, you can try getting a previous generation from second hand market.
There are lots of questions to answer before any recommendation could make sense. How many users? 720p, 1080p, or 4k content? Transcoding? Remote streaming or local only? WAN bandwidth? How much storage? Power requirements? Is prebuilt a requirement? Budget? And probably more.
Plex and Jellyfin are the two main servers the handle this kind of thing. Both have benefits, but Plex hides some features behind a paywall ans Jellyfin is FOSS.
I just installed TrueNAS on a desktop with a lot of SATA slots. https://www.truenas.com/
Throwing my vote for QNAP in the ring.
If you go with QNAP be careful with what you provide access to over the internet. QNAP seems to have security vulnerabilities quite often. It would probable best to only use a VPN to access any services/media on it.
Very freedom-respecting. Probably the only consumer NAS vendor with instructions on how to install linux (bare-metal) on the official wiki. Their x86 boxen are 90% normal pc… with the remaining 10% being a bit nuisance.
