I don’t really understand this discussion. if you are only going for media consumption. Hard drives are fine and more than fast enough. Only if you have lots of small files like documents and photos, SSD’s would be faster. But for just streaming a video file at 10mbit it really doesn’t matter if it’s a hard drive or SSD.
You could always just run an hard drive zfs pool and add a 512gb ssd as a L2arc for better read.
Looking at your case, do you need data storage apart from media? If not i would just build a small pc with silent drives and put it into your pc cabinet. start it up when you need to watch something.
If you want to have an actual fileserver, it can be a bit more tricky to combine a computer into it as well. Something like a windows VM with the GPU passed through could be used for watching video’s and then a VM for file storage. But that would take a bitmore effort/time to setup.
Really like where this is going.
Like a previous suggestion with RAM, this is really something to consider.
I do understand both points in this.
SSDs are small and silent, which opens a lot of possibilities. But yes, the price is a higher (even if to buy a lower tier - higher chance of having a blast).
HDDs, on the other hand, are trustworthy to say the least. But yes, same point of size and sound.
Media only. I am now even going through Synologies once more to see if there is a way to have what I want without paying the price of doing a mandatory format.
Plex made its second step into forcing users away from hosting their own media and moving into just streaming. This is the direction they have wanted to be heading for the past 2-3 years when they introduced ad-based streaming services and started prioritising revenue vs their customer base who helped make Plex what it was. Now they have made one more big step in this direction, by shutting down a couple of hosting companies users were using to host their plex server. In the name of piracy of course. Next, they will move to block more hosting companies, and eventually discontinue local media hosting “since so few users use it” or some BS. They already tried a step in this direction before by shutting down the very popular Plex Home Theater app, but the backlash was too high then and it returned. They didnt have the streaming customers they needed yet, but how they do.
So if you dont already have plans for where you will be moving instead of using Plex within the next 2 years then you should really be starting to think about it. Emby and Jellyfin are the two leading contenders. Emby is the closest to how Plex was right before streaming was introduced, and Jellyfin is a favorite because of its many similar features and is open source.
As for the OP and the hardware questions in this thread:
I think @wertigon has the right idea for where to start by first thinking about your goals with this project. Most of which you are now already doing.
How much storage do you want now, how much expandability do you want in the future? You could grab a pair of 8TB hard drives right now for $250 and either pool them for 16TB of space or mirror them for 8TB of space with some redundancy in case one dies. I started with just a few drives around 2TB way back in the day, and now I have 3 disk shelves full of drives and am around a half a petabyte capacity. lol. So these sorts of projects in my experience tend to grow a lot. But you can always replace your tower down the line and just move your hard drives if you need more room.
What is your backup solution going to look like? Extra drives that are mirror or parity to recover from drive failure, or cloud backup? If you stay Windows OS you lose ZFS file system of TrueNAS (can use StorageSpaces though) but gain the ability to back up your entire media server for $12/mo now matter how many TB of storage you have.
Do you need to stay desktop/tower based or do you have a network rack in your home already that you could mount a server in? A small unit in the office is fine, but having the server centrally located and just use an app to watch your movies/tv is also really nice.
That’s the thing - I have no real intention to backup. This is mostly TPBay type data, which is mostly recoverable (apart from something really rare).
The file list of the drive would be more irreplaceable than the actual data (by this day I am still beating myself for not saving the name of one chinese comedy like kung fu movie, made in the early days, which I forgot and can’t remember enough reference…).
This is the thing. If I were to go NAS, I would have gone for Synology. But I don’t wish to have the data backed up nor to be forced to format the drives upon installation.
For now, I would even go for a 2 drive Synology, if it didn’t have the upper NAS things I don’t like. Take notes from that experience (I generally like the idea of a small plug and play box, which I can put wherever I want and hook it up to ethernet).
The idea of PC is good, because PC wins in much things in my past:
Should I go PC or console for TV (saying hello to PS’s market prices vs Steam).
Should I go PC VR or a standalone VR(Meta Oculus etc).
Should I go PC media server or NAS device.
But an extra PC is a hassle in both making, cost and where to place.
Sadly, no. No space in my rented apartment to consider a server rack (or even the cabling). I remember LTT’s video with Linus’ “tech closet”. Apart from thunderbolting regular PCs, I did like the idea (maybe when I’ll afford a house… and live in a country I actually want to live in).
One alternative that could work depending on your budget, is the 6 drive Asustor Flashstor. Unfortunately sold out on Amazon right now, but a 6 bay m.2 server taking up less than 3 liters of space (193mm x 307mm x 48mm) for ~$450 is an interesting concept.
It is possible the server inside this one might be a bit too weak to handle full media decoding though, which would necessitate a decoding box near your TV regardless. Interesting as a NAS in it’s own right, but no idea if it is good for you personally.
Thats before it fills the caching space, say you spend a day importing blu ray media tv shows and movies your going to exceed it caching space in which case its write speed is more like 150mb/s wich the hdds can match and beat it. So in a nas where endurances is as import or more important the hard drive actually paints a better picture. The longer the workload lasts the better the hdd will look. Also the chaching space is a direct inverse perportion to how full the drive is at half capacity the amount you can write a “full speed” with be even less. Note these reviews use empty drives so tend to be skewed to best case, not real world or what you will see after using for a year.
Mine do regularly hit the spec sheet number of 210
im assuming your mobo has 6-8 sata slots, no need for raid controler unless doing last senario, also assuming you use zfs for raid like activities, which is free. In the last scenario you could have bought a 13th drive for equal price i was instead assuming the $55 went to another sata controler.
My nas is is in fractal define r5($125 on newegg), which is not big fancy or exspencive. I have 10 3.5 hdds(8 in 3.5 bays 2 in 5.25bays) in it and 4 2.5 inch ssds(2 in ssd mounts 2 doublesided taped to the other 2 ssds). its a atx case that is not that big compared to most atx cases. Its also pretty good at containing the noise so the nas is near silent only time you can here it is when the ac is not running, and no media is playing.
Now i have not argued the silent ssd thing much and if your willing to trade the money for silence that is your choice.
My argument from the beginning has been you don’t need to spend $366(1 8tb ssd) to do what $112(2 4tb hdd striped together 420 read/write, windows has a software raid feature to do this) can do, unless you really think the sound is going to be a problem.
For now Plex works best for me, i have looked at and tested the others and for my purposes Plex happens to be the most feature complete no hassle solution for me. I named them all so people could look at all of them and make their mind up for themselves.
i would stay way form this 4gb of ram is going to bite you in the a** i would say 8gb is a minimum requirement. Also the 5105 processor in that is also not exactly a powerhouse and you may find it lacking. (I have a mini pc with that processor)
Spinning rust can saturate 1gigabit, however he wants to plug this into his living room tv and do media playback. Dont think the 5105 is up to 4k playback without a stutter here or there.
Good for you. How many people has an old desktop case with that many 3.5" slots? Probably not many, so a new NAS case becomes a necessity unless you have an old tower with a ton of HDD spots. Far too many buy stuff like the Corsair 4000D Airflow, Phanteks Evolv X, Corsair Carbide 100R, BitFenix Nova… Even expensive cases lack 5+ 3.5"
Same thing with the motherboards. Most bought something with 4 SATA ports, thinking that was ok because they wouldn’t need more. The market has been 4 SATA ports the last 5 years, except for a handful of exceptions. So, no, “just use your old one as a hand me down” won’t work for everyone. If it does, great!
Oh, certainly. You don’t need to spend $300 on an X670 board either when you can slot a Ryzen 7950X into a $70 A620 board either. Technically true, buuuuut…
My chief argument is that in 2028, chances are high both SATA and 3.5" drives will be deprecated and viewed as legacy products. NAS are typically a 10 year system if not more. So investing in 3.5" infrastructure to house a bunch of rapidly aging 3.5" drives in 2023 should be done with the full knowledge of knowing what you are getting yourself into.
You can buy a 3.5" today. Same as you can buy a B450 + Ryzen 5700X system extremely cheap by the standards of today. If you do spend a little bit more though, it is probably more worth your money.
Especially at higher capacities, $112 for two 4TB when you can buy one 8TB for $139, 12TB for $200, 16TB for $229? At 16TB, you pay $5 more for the same capacity in a single drive, and making your system more reliable (since one part at 98% reliability is better than five parts at 99% reliability) and decrease complexity.
So my point still stands - When it comes to HDDs, go big or go SSD. There is really no point in buying anything smaller than 8TB HDDs today. An argument can definitely be made for $$$/TB and HDDs at high capacities are definitely still essential. SSDs are more expensive now but counting in the infrastructure it isn’t that much more money.
Here is an example using the 12 bay Asustor vs a (very expensive? o_O) Synology 8 bay, I know there are cheaper things out there though but let’s do some sort of real world example:
As we can see, yes you do get more storage but the SSDs Total Cost is way cheaper. If we lower that to $100 6TB HDDs, we are pretty much at price parity. Even if the Total Cost was down significantly to something like $2.1k for the Synology though, that still means the SSD solution only carry a premium of about 30% more.
Not saying HDDs are worthless - but the infrastructure cost makes it a far less appealing option these days. If those costs are already bought and paid for though… Why not?
Good thing RAM is upgradable on that one then. 4GB is low but not unusable in a home setting. If you want more, buy more, a 16 GB stick cost like, what, $30-$40?
i doubt a 9900k and 2080ti are socketed into a motherboard with less than 6sata maybe OP can confirm. I would not be suggestion otherwise.
Not quite correct if were trying to do things correctly we would have some form of data redundancy so either mirrored 8tb drives or raid z1 or raid 5 group of 3 4tb drives for 8tb worth of capacity. comparing these two options thats $168 for 3 4tb drives, or $279 for 2 8tb drives. Bigger drives are not always the solution or cheaper per tb. in fact going with mirrored 8tb drives over 3 4tb drives actualy cost 60% more money. smaller drives make a lot of sense for smaller storage nas. Picking the correct number and capacity is key.
Lets now multiply either figure by 3 to get the price of the same storage amount in flash ~508 and ~837. None of these configs use more than 4 sata ports including the os or system drive weather ssd or hdd. But we have a price spread from $168 to ~$807 for the storage alone of thess propose nas’s.
There is no price parity, weather at low or high capacity.
This is a terrible comparison on a number of different levels. Why would i spend 1765 on a synology when you could by the r5 define a i5 or r5 cpu and motherboard 64gb of ram and psu for half that type of money. Im also sure the synolgy is faster than the asustor compute wise and the custom pc im suggesting probably could mop the floor of both. You have half the money of the hdd solution tied up in a synology nas meant for high capacity drives. In your origianl comparison of a 48tb flash vs a 96tb spinning rust the price per tb is $56/tb vs $35. Also rember with synology your paying as much for the software solution that asotor is not providing as you are the hardware.
your more comparing the cost of two prebuilt computer nas solution here more than your comparing the cost of the drives and there capacity. And you picked about the most unfavorable one you could
That’s because you are using a 10W CPU and you need a higher power one to actually use things like QuickSync. The ULP CPUs are performance-capped by the TDP and cooling according to Anand.
I guess if OP is looking at getting something that is ultra low power on the CPU side then yes he wont be able to use QuickSync effectively. If you use a normal desktop CPU, 45w and above, it performs fine though.
also if were comparing low end flash drives to mid to high end hard drives intended for nas use, a true hdd vs ssd price comparison could probalby use the reminder that you could use something like this https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NP6ACSQ?tag=synack-20&linkCode=osi&th=1 at $18 for 4tb. At $4.5/tb hdd just blow flash out of the water when you really start looking at ALL of your options.
4GB is low but not unusable in a home setting. If you want more, buy more, a 16 GB stick cost like, what, $30-$40?