Hey All, I currently have a Mac Mini that runs torrenting and plex server - very basic, and extremely slow (runs windows) it reads everything on the NAS for plex/torrents etc. I'm hoping to upgrade my NAS at some point, it's a 2bay synology, and quite old. And very slow. I wondered what people may suggest I do to upgrade this? I know some NAS can run plex (not sure if you need premium plex though? Which I don't have.) - but not sure about doing torrents? So thought about maybe all being in one NAS - but would be a while yet as i'll want at least 4 bay, and I know it gets very expensive (seems around £900... ) Are there any cheaper/better(easy) alternatives I should think about? That people may suggest? Just moved house so want to streamline my stuff a bit, and speed it up. tia :}
The NAS, the Mac Mini, or both? If you’re prepared to DIY, you’ve got a lot of options. A good starting place would be TrueNas Scale and 3+ disks for a ZFS array. Take a look at this calculator to help figure out how much storage space you’d get depending on how many disks you have, the redundancy level, and the capacity of each disk. A RAIDZ1 array can rebuild after losing a single disk, and a RAIDZ2 array can suffer a loss of two disks. What level of redundancy you want will depend on your risk tolerance for data loss, but if it’s important data you should keep backups either way (preferably in the cloud such as backblaze, or some other remote machine). Only other thing to mention is that the disks will need to be the same size and you’ll want CMR disks, not SMR - SMR does not play well with ZFS and risks data loss. TrueNAS Scale supports deploying applications in Docker containers, and Plex is one of the applications available right out of the box from official repos. As for the PC hardware for DIY TrueNAS… Well… take your pick. You can easily get by with a 4th/6th gen Intel onwards and ideally a minimum of 16GB RAM. Beyond that it really depends on how many applications you plan to deploy on it and how much data will be pulled from it. If you wanted to thrash the bejesus out of a high-speed SSD array then you’d want some seriously beefy hardware and networking; but if you’re just streaming media in the home, rust spinners and modest specs will be fine. I’d highly recommend grabbing VirtualBox and spinning up a TrueNAS Scale virtual machine to play around with.
Truenas CORE used jails [bc BSD] and SCALE used k3s and helm for its 'app store' rather than docker... and whilst iirc you could get docker and/or docker compose to work on Scale it was a bit janky and never officially supported That, however is about to change...
I mean, essentially the NAS would have hopefully replaced both. As the Mac is literally only used as plex media server, and browsing/downloading of torrents/downloads (to the NAS) - nothing else. I connected from my main PC via RealVNC to control it and browse, which was unbelievably slow. So, so long as whatever I do can run plex well, browse for/download torrents, and be a NAS. I am prepared to do DIY, so i'm not scared of that. But ease of use is pretty important. And cost. I know ready built NAS (syn/qnap/wd etc) are outright more expensive, but they're basically plug and play. For them it would be like, the roughly £200 each HDD (x4 6-8TB based on WD Red PLus 8TB WD80EFPX so ~-/+ £800 on HDD) then the NAS itself, which seem to be up to £900 themselves for a good one. It won't be thrashed at all either. Or run lots of apps I don't think... Would be home streaming of films/shows etc - and the only real transferring would be moving those files to the correct places in the first instance. If it is good/big enough I may look at using it as backup for PC things etc - but that would be a future possibility. So obviously future proofing it balanced against cost. RAM is sort of cheapish at times, so i'd probably look at minimum 32GB ish, So if I can DIY for a LOT less then it could be worth the time to research the best performance for price CPU/RAM. I just don't want to have to keep mucking about with software/hardware constantly once it is set up. And has to be very small. And I am not well versed in SFF based things ;D And usually appears to be expensive when you go small. So, a bit to ponder!
Yes, that is true. However, for someone who sounds like they’re relatively new to this world and coming from a “server” machine using Windows, I was trying to avoid over-complicating matters . The average home user isn’t necessarily going to be the one writing the Helm charts or compose files, so the distinction between Docker and Kubernetes is largely irrelevant. Besides. If you really want to get pedantic then they’re all the same thing under the bonnet anyway . Kubernetes started out using an interface called “Dockershim” to interface with Docker in order to run containers. Until Docker created the containerd runtime which became the container runtime for both Docker and Kubernetes. Other runtimes are now available and supported by the myriad iterations of Kubernetes, such as podman, but containerd is still the de-facto standard for defining containers. The difference between an helm chart and compose file largely just comes down syntax. In fact I was converting compose files to helm charts the other day using kompose.
I hope that they settle on docker, or at least settle on one ecosystem they'll be supporting going forward. I've never used this or kubernetes before and would rather not learn a way of doing things that goes by the wayside in a couple of years... I've a test server ready and waiting for SCALE to reach a stage of maturity before it can replace my current CORE system, this'd be the final step for to bring that into production!
I have a Synology DS218+, works great and super easy to set up, pretty much plug and play. I ran Plex on the NAS for a while and it all worked great. Previously had DS213j, zero problems with it. Only upgraded because photo indexing and prep for their photo app was really slow on the low end processor. Ds218+ works great and zero need to change for the foreseeable future. Seems very reliable, never lost data in many OS version upgrades over the years (started in 2008 with a 4 bay something). Currently on the NAS, I run: Chat (whatsapp between family, photos are saved on it rather than take up phone storage), Photos (family photo album and all family member's phone photo auto backup), VPN server, Synology's own Music and Video services for their apps, "Drive" as in my Dropbox replacement. It's all very easy to setup and start using, much easier than setup via my own home server. I've tried a few open source alternatives and none are as sleek or easy to setup. However, due to running Home Assistant, I've been running other non-Synology stuff in my own Proxmox server. Recently the server machine died so I've invested in 2 servers (plus a docker qdevice running on the NAS) for high availability setup. I think this way of separating data and configurable services offer great flexibility and I learn a little bit running Proxmox and Dockers. Only downside with Synology is gigabit ethernet speeds. I have a 2.5 GbE adaptor running on it and a direct link to my desktop PC to get faster file transfers. Built-in GbE for everything else. For the hardware they are the most expensive. But just like Apple/Tesla, I feel their software is worth the price of admission. Of course you can run XPenology, I've tested it on a HP microserver, but reliability and upgradability feels sketchy, I may be wrong though. In your situation, a commercial-off-the-shelf NAS box is probably easiest. The COTS NAS are small and shouldn't require tinkering. I've certainly left the NAS to its own and only had to manually trigger major OS updates. Everything else including its apps and minor OS updates are all done automatically. There is also half-way house such as HP microserver, saves you from component selection but cheaper because you need to tinker with your own software.
