put your electricity bill into consideration when getting something that supposed to be running 24/7. Off the shelf parts while being weaker, usually have lower TDP parts that can save you over hundreds just in a year of 24/7 operation, especially when you electricity bill is already through the roof like in bay area.
Good advice, of course you can also tweak it to a lower power-setting but indeed, more cores and higher clock frequency is not always better. A 4C with a low clock-frequency would probably be better for a media/storage-server considering the lower electricity cost.
If you settle for just a reliable NAS with comparable speeds of off the shelf NAS appliances: dont run TrueNAS as that is almost enterprise grade and requires horsepower. If you want easy to use and not too much whistle and bells: There is still Windows based storage spaces. Use a flagship motherboard from 3 or 4 years ago with a low power processor and 16Gb of RAM. Install either windows 10/11 and enable storage spaces. Create a mirorred storage space !!! Agreed: not as efficient as parity, but more reliable and very fast. Use enterprise grade hard drives or SSDs and there you go. You got a low power reliable NAS which most probably will outperform a similar priced off the shelf NAS. Advantage: If hardware fails, pull the drives out, connect them to any other windows machine (order in which you attach does not matter) and boom... you are up and running again. In my opinion the above is a very underrated solution as all YT channels focus on TrueNas etc... which requires quite some knowledge to run. For my NAS and other IT systems in my home, I always think: if something happens to me, either my wife or kids need to be able to get at least to the photos and personal stuff and they need to be able to keep internet up and running. So keep it stupid simple, safe and reliable (yes, potentially with the cost of a couple of more disks when it comes to the NAS, but at least they can connect the disks to any PC in the home and access whatever is on it as long as they have the user credentials...0 Above solution is NOT for content creators requiring 100+ TB of storage which can be accessed at the speed of light for real time editing of videos of course... 🙂
These homelab dweebs don't care about power use because they've got sponsorships and Patreon. Why else would any sane person have a 42U rack full of off-lease quad socket servers in their basement just for PiHole and Wireguard?
I have tried both. The biggest difference is reliability. If you want something that just works, go off the shelf. If you want to tinker, have fun rolling your own. I would not recommend Windows, especially the home version, for live recording with Plex. I do use Synology for Plex, but only as a home server.
My problem with using old desktops is the power consumption. For someone like me who lives in a warm climate with a really well insulated house, the power consumption and heat from a desktop running 24/7 is a nonstarter.
You can get intel cpu chips and amd that run low power about 35 watts or get the board Jeff has and it's a mobile cpu also ryzen low power stat is crazy good.
This, my downclocked old pc parts with all power saving options enabled still used 4-5x more power than my aftermarket NAS (same drives). With the rising power costs here, I made the money I spent on my NAS back within a year due to power savings.
I think people should really evaluate a NAS. If you don't need access to all that data all the time I don't know why a person would want that data mounted in the first place. Having an eSata port is a wonderful thing. Most ATX MBs will give you a PCIe slot at the bottom that won't have conflicts with the GPU, that run through the chipset. In fact you can buy a connector that will hook up an internal SATA port and run to the back panel and give an eSATA port. This gives a connection to the outside world that's a little more friendly than USB (I've had issues using USB sometimes).
Good info, fair. Most of us would have old PCs - I have 3 - that can be cannibalised. That saves $1k. Other than the size of old tower. The buy vs build cost is standard - go to a restaurant, vs cook own meal. It's always cheaper to DIY, but the penalty is time. You're basically buying time.
I ran my own NAS/Homeserver for many years (was VIA Epia based, if somebody still remembers these guys)... but though I had enough Linux admin-knowledge came to the decision, that I would prefer to spend my free-time otherwise and bought a Qnap NAS. Besides the significantly reduced admin-effort, this solution also is more efficient, than my self-build system and saving ~10W in a System running 24/7 also sums up over the livespan of the system and at Europe energy-costs means you can invest 100-150€ more into the purchase-price of the Synology/QNAP NAS, if it is more efficient.
I use a cheap Terramaster nas with tiny red pill bootloader for Synology OS 7. Been running solid for years. With nvme cache and Synology cloud access.
I agree with Jeff. Have a lot of large drives 12-20TB it's gotten cheaper to be a good data hoarder. Not sure the old 1tb-3tb what to do with other than redundancy.
You could throw them in a ZFS pool and use them as one drive. (ZFS stands for Zettabyte File System.) ZFS addresses some issues that RAID has since ZFS is both a file system and a logical volume manager. ZFS has been in improved upon for decades and is seen as reliable legacy software. (SUN Microsystems started development of ZFS in 2001.)
Old hardware can be recycled into PC flipping. If you already have most of the parts you can build a system on the cheap, slap in a 3 tb hard drive that's been fully cleaned, to pair with a 256gb SSD, and you're good to go for selling it.
Best thing i did was take the time to build my own plex server using unraid vs a synology. For the same money i built something with 8 times the ram and the ability to transcode 5 4k streams at once (the synology would struggle with 1) not to mention i have 11 bays vs the 8 bay synology i was looking at. This was only my 3rd build. It took me an Afternoon to put together and get it set up. I understand some people may not even have that much free time but i think most people get overwhelmed by the thought of building a pc but its surprisingly easy.
@@utmichael2008 sorry I never saw this till now. Core i5-10400, asus tuf gaming b560m mobo, silicon power 1tb ssd,32gb team group ddr4 ram, 32gb, febsmart 6 port sata card with asmedia chip confirmed to work with unraid, fractal define r5 case with 8 bays, icydock 3 bay hotswatp cage for dual 5.25" bay, a few noctua fans, Thermaltake 750w tough power psu. I could've skimped on some of those items like psu and mobo and cpu and been fine but still was around the 1k mark. The cost to put 9 18tb disks in it was around 3 grand though. It runs unraid with 2 of the drives dedicated to parity. Ive run it nonstop for 2 years without issue.
@@user-ih6oe9ny3j I replied to other comment above with the parts used. Honestly any 10th gen or higher intel cpu with quicksync, decent ddr4 ram and 1tb ssd for cache in a fractal case will smoke any pre-built nas. The money is in the storage. I'd recommend using a lsi sata card in IT mode from artofserver on ebay over a standard sata expansion card like I used though.
I like my Synology DS920+ & DX517 expansion unit. I could easily throw some drives into one of my 14 (15 once I find a replacement CPU i9-9900KS or even i7-9700K), but the problem I always run into is a good networking software.
I just got my first computer a few months ago. I’m definitely building my own nas this month. I don’t know much but with all the information online and help in forums I think it’s very doable
If you’re just storing files or setting something up for family, off the shelf is fine. It’s quick and easy. If you’re doing beyond just network storage then DIY and learning how to maintain it is going to be the better long term solution. Pick your solution or parts for your task and situation. Maybe you just need a 2-4 disk standalone box. Or you might be looking at a 8-12U rack with a disk shelf and multiple thin clients and a UPS, or just a full depth full height rack loaded up with everything. There is no 1 size fits all. That’s why we’re PC users.
I'm amused by the fact no one is mentioning the planned obsolescence of turnkey NAS caused by lack of firmware updates (I'm looking at you Synology but others are guilty of it too). It's a Network Attached Storage. It has to run securely on the Network so it needs regularly updated firmware else you lose a lot functionality because you can´t connect your server to the Internet anymore. That's the thing with DIY, as you're running of the shelf hardware and not proprietary hardware you'll never be stuck with EOL solutions. And you'll never get stuck with controllers that are unable to run bigger drives because the NAS wasn't built at the time to handle their size.
He normally does a lot of enterprise refurbished / recertified on Ebay and alike. Sas drives are also normally a little cheaper but require an hba / raid card (you would want the hba or if you go the raid card you would want it in hba mode)
@@Dgodwin94 thank you! I didn't know that retired enterprise hardware was sold on ebay. Is there a specific flag/tag to look up? Or just searching "enterprises refurbished" will do the job?
I luv my Synology NAS'es and they've been running reliably for years but their recent stance to force users to use their own Synology HDDs/SSDs/etc. is making me think of just going with a different brand or just DIY my own for the next upgrade. 😔
They also won't stand behind their drives. I have a 920+ and the Synology NVMe cache was corrupting the data. I proved it by removing them and it worked fine, whereas as soon as I put in the Synology NVMe it corrupted my Plex database. They were brand new and they wouldn't replace them or accept any responsibility. Now that I need a 12-16 bay NAS, there is no way I will go Synology.
@@ryanmalone2681 That sux! Yea! Synology don't realize they will be loosing more business by being greedy and now not even supporting their own products that are forced upon us. 😮💨
i wen't pre built because i couldn't find a good priced case that fits my specifications (as small as possible, ideally sound deadening, atleast options for 4x 3..5" HDD) and by the time i put together what hardware i was thinking i was already matching a prebuilt but still lacking any software solutions. (since it's practically an always on device i'd use the latest/most efficient hardware over some old cheap but power burning hardware). that said i have had to swap my dual core synology for a quadcore asustor, plex / jellyfin worked fine but pi-hole was actually capable of pushing the dual core to it's limit XD but i still only spent about 450 euro (no HDD's). was also nice because synology really dragged on allowing OS install's on the M2 SSD's, i have no use for a SSD cache but running the OS of a SSD is never bad. which is what i now have with my asustor, my OS and docker containers all run from the SSD and when i start to watch a show on jellyfin my HDD's wake up (WD red +'s so they can be awake 24/7 but i doubt a nap now and then is going to kill them). i hated how PLEX kept my NAS/hdd's busy 24/7 doing god knows what so switching to jellyfin was also a much kinder use of it's resources.
Interesting. I dunno, what’s the power consumption of an off the shelf NAS vs the homebrew NAS++ thing. I just want a safe place to stash my files. If I want to Plex or self host, I’ll build something specific.
Was looking a Synology until I found out that it is going to give me issues for not paying stupid price for their branded hard drives and not my own. So back to looking just rolling my own.
The most important parts of a NAS are network and storage. Secondary size, cpu and energy usage depending on use case. As for DIY NAS I found it difficult to find a suitable mainboard. Today you probably want to use SATA and/ or NVMe SSD. In that case 1 or 2 2.5 GbE port would be the absolute minimum for networking, 10 or 25 SFP+ the optimum. If you even think about a DIY NAS you probably want at least 4 SATA ports. There is no way to get a mainboard with these features onboard. Today moainboards have often only 4 SATA ports and probably a single 2.5 GbE. So several PCIe slots with at least 4 lanes or more are needed (16x with bifurcation for 4x M.2 card, 4x for a single port 10GbE card, maybe another for storage controller). In the consumer spaces we are talking about ATX form factor or above. In my case I either end up with another main PC build with special software or to buy a professinal NAS for way above 1.000€. For professional use I would go with either NAS or storage server. A storage server would give the freedom of OS choice. NAS OS typically only support basic RAID configurations. In my use case I decided against both, put more storage in my main PC, use my old NAS for cold storage and just wait for the times to come.
I am looking for around 30tb and be able to stream plex on up to 12 devices at once at 1080p with ease. The prebuilt seems incredibly weak on the cpus and i dont know how many devices they can handle at once. Money is not really the issue for me.
When Jeff mentioned SLAs, I couldn’t help thinking, well, just make it redundant. Have two servers either sharing storage or being the redundancy. 😂👨🏼🏫
Jellyfin or Plex aren't built for that. They can't share a database. Sure, you can have two servers, but then you deal with two accounts per user, two play queues etc
Excellent questions! Every question I would ask. Thank you so much. I'm not knowledgeable enough for an off-the-shelf. And this video just confirmed it! 😂 Keep up the great content!!
As a professional programmer, my income stream is based in developing and maintaining a corporate API that has to run 24/7. Since there are only so many hours per day I can devote to technology, tinkering with home-brew is not on my agenda. I'm always first looking for turnkey solutions with shallow learning curves, even if they cost more $$ up front and aren't the be-all end-all solution. There are no free lunches and your time is the most valuable of prices to pay.
OK, I do have an A/V issue for either of you (Adam) or Jeff, after a VLC player update in October/November 2023, and since then I've had issues with audio cutting out for 3 to 5 seconds in RANDOM intervals when listening to TV shows or Movies that are streaming from my Synology. I've Uninstalled/Reinstalled VLC, I've checked the VLC Reddit boards and tried all the settings and still there are times when the Audio drops out (the video keeps playing). Any ideas 💡?
Check the windows error log as soon as you can after an event. This sounds like an audio driver could be crashing. Normally it takes a little longer than that for a driver to recover, but it’s not unheard of.
@firecwby1999 Thanks for the suggestion but I think it was one of my 2TB NVME boot drives, as it ended up taking the entire bootloader down with it 3 weeks ago. I sent it in for warranty and put another 2TB NVME in that system, had to reload Windows and ALL my software (which I was not happy about, next time I think I'll make an ISO of the drive and keep it on the NAS), but the AUDIO problem is gone, which is about the only positive experience from this so let that be a lesson, keep a backup ISO of your main drive.
I’m wanting to digitize my dvd collection for personal use and have an effective storage solution. I am wanting a system that would give me scraped data similar to netflix(ie-movie summary, case artwork) Does anyone know of a good solution?
TrueNas Scale for plex and photoprism or jusr get a synology so i can back up photos from cell phones. Its really the hassel of learning how to config that
I build a TrueNas Scale system and never got it really stable. The network share works but I’ve had a lot of problems with apps, vm’s and the main gui freezing. I might have some bad hardware, but I don’t think it’s _only_ that. If I had set it up today I would gave used Truenas Core or bought a Synology.
You get so much more for the money by building your own. I built my own FreeNAS box using brand new server hardware, ECC memory, and Xeon cpu and its been running for the most part of a decade. I've had to resilver a few HDs over the years but that's it. When I build a second machine, I'll be upgrading that to TrueNAS. Once that's up and running I'll upgrade the old nas to TrueNAS too and use the new server for proxmox. The old nas will remain as my production nas.
Many off the shelve NAS's can do plex perfectly fine without having to deep dive on building your own. It's a massive undertaking and suggest avoiding it unless you really want to spend weeks learning and research on hardware.
Actually, only the good off-the-shelf ones can deal with on-the-fly transcoding easily: the consumer level ones are riddled with old Celerons or worse, ARM CPUs that were used on circa-2017 phones with 512 MB to 1 GB of RAM that are pathetically weak to do anything other than be used as a fileserver. See the Asustor AS1102T or the Synology DS220j to have a good idea of what I am talking about. Once you start budgeting for a decent Synology unit, you start to get into the price range of powerful DIY setups that will outperform that Synology by 10-fold.
@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 what's the purpose of transcoding though? If I wanted to get a NAS so I can stream my movie collection through infuse on the apple tv do I need to transcode anything or can't it just stream the movie as if I was watching it on a 4k blu ray player?
@@AGILISFPV Having live transcode capabilities grants you the ability to reproduce the media no matter what: whether the codec used for the source files is supported by your player or not or in cases where the media player offers very limited codec support (think web browsers or older smart TV appliances). But it can also come handy when, for example, you are trying to watch movies from a remote location and thus the stream is transcoded from, say, 4K down to 720p for smoother playback. Indeed some players do have the ability to handle the stream "as is" but the media server software usually tries to determine that on a case by case basis and then serves whatever it thinks is best for the situation.
Turn your old computer into a NAS storage by installing a suitable version of Linux on it when support has run out for your Windows OS e.g. Windows 7 and 8.1 era machines that have decent multi core support. Minimal change needed
It’s a great way to start. Keep in mind the electric cost though, in some cases it can be cheaper to buy new (or newer) hardware due to lower electricity usage. But I think it’s great if you can start with what you have and then learn if you want to upgrade or switch to a prebuilt nas.
@@PatrikKron if running it as a Nas you can probably underclock your processor, run it in energy efficiency mode, enable the iGPU, remove any PCI-E cards except network cards, replace the power supply with a better rated one or one made for small form factor, that might make a little difference
I am a fan of Jeff for a long time. But recently I found that NAS cases are priced in a way that the whole build end up more expensive than the regular 4bay NAS on Amazon. Unless you are prepared to use non hot swappable trays, (atypical NAS) then may be you, can make it cheaper.
Same (except I run Jellyfin). I am running Proxmox on mine - after an upgrade to 16GB of RAM - with several LXCs containers and a few VMs and it runs like a champ. I love my Beelink!
I really hate when people Express enthusiasm for the DIY aspect but then want to shy away from having to learn how to do something like everything else in life you're not going to know how to do everything perfectly the first time it's a learning experience so learn
simple: if you're asking such question in first place, you probably should not build your own :D NAS means network attached storage, and if you're planning to tinker with important and sensitive data, good luck having proper backup strategy :P
Power consumption is one of the biggest problems. Skill set is another problem with self built. How many technicians know the importance of zfs or cloud bucket backup solutions.
@@salto1994I know this. I watched this video over a month ago so I'm not sure if they brought up the 923+ and I commented about having a 920+. Either way there are still affordable options options with Quick Sync, like the 423+.
I'd like to add to the discussion (I'm 30s in) ... and that is NVME (or SATA6, I suppose) NAS purely aimed at media storage for playback and nothing else. Surely there is a cheap way to do this, but I'm unable to find a way that doesn't either cost the earth or make more noise than my mother at a hairdressing salon. Bearing in mind that the solution will require at least 2.5gbe and passive cooling. There's some good things coming from the SBC land like the FriendlyELEC CM3588 ... but the issue that comes is the lack of a truly opensource OS. I won't use the OS images supplied by these companies because of trust issues, and prefer that there is a properly opensource way to do things since I have security concerns there.
It really depends on how much storage you want and how fast it needs to be. CWWK who makes pretty much all of the small router boards that come out of china has a 4x m.2 PCIe x1 board that can be put in the 4 port Alder Lake-N version. So long as you could work out cooling that would get you 4x 2.5gb ports + 4x M.2 in a small passive case for probably around $250 USD (you just need to provide memory and storage).
That would increase the amount of devices owned by someone significantly since if I want to run a bunch of VMs and also to store media and then stream it via Plex then I have to own multiple devices and they should have decent power since they too should be capable of handling the workload
I would like to say that most people that want a NAS for their home are not the people that will be commenting here. They just want a safe place to keep stuff and host media. They don't need to virtualise their life or whatever. ;-)
I believe either the expert is coming from an agenda or he has no idea of current QNAP offerings. QNAP has options with 32 XEON cores 1TB of RAM and 24 U.2 bays. They also have entry-level systems and intermediary packages like the QNAP TS-h973AX or stronger like the QNAP TVS-h1288X with a 6 core Xeon W-1250 at 3.3ghz and up to 128GB of RAM. It also has 8 bays for HDD, 4 for SATA SSDs, and 2 for m.2 The TVS-h1288X also supports ethernet over Thunderbolt with an optional card. So plenty of options.
if u have lots of free time and patience to mess around build it yourself, if u just want something that work and not interested in wasting your time, a set it and forget it, buy synology or something and save urself some time and headache, and go fishing or smth
I absolutely hate IT appliances. Build your own. NO Synology. No Drobo, an open source custom ZFS system will kill them performance wise and reliability wise if done right, and can be recovered using any system you can hook up a drive to, you don't need some proprietary system. It's a no-brainer.
Actually, only the good off-the-shelf ones can deal with on-the-fly transcoding easily: the consumer level ones are riddled with old Celerons or worse, ARM CPUs that were used on circa-2017 phones with 512 MB to 1 GB of RAM that are pathetically weak to do anything other than be used as a fileserver. See the Asustor AS1102T or the Synology DS220j to have a good idea of what I am talking about. Once you start budgeting for a decent Synology unit, you start to get into the price range of powerful DIY setups that will outperform that Synology by 10-fold.
I disagree, Jeff knows his stuff, he was careful limiting into price ranges for a reason. A $1000 diy solution can run circles around 90% of off the self units. Some of those being $2k similar
"so you've completed your windows inception and you have windows running inside your windows because dog i heard you like windows" that tutorial help me earn more than $2000 dollars in a year. Thank you.
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
![Noob To Max With DRAGON REWORK In Blox Fruits [FULL MOVIE]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LnBMOinoOvA/mqdefault.jpg)
Fantastic seeing Jeff out in the wild. The world needs more Jeff.
and we need Gordon back.
I am glad to see that Adam's guest has a stimulating influence. Yes, play with it yourself, make a Pi-hole and all that, it is fun.
put your electricity bill into consideration when getting something that supposed to be running 24/7. Off the shelf parts while being weaker, usually have lower TDP parts that can save you over hundreds just in a year of 24/7 operation, especially when you electricity bill is already through the roof like in bay area.
Good advice, of course you can also tweak it to a lower power-setting but indeed, more cores and higher clock frequency is not always better. A 4C with a low clock-frequency would probably be better for a media/storage-server considering the lower electricity cost.
If you settle for just a reliable NAS with comparable speeds of off the shelf NAS appliances: dont run TrueNAS as that is almost enterprise grade and requires horsepower. If you want easy to use and not too much whistle and bells: There is still Windows based storage spaces. Use a flagship motherboard from 3 or 4 years ago with a low power processor and 16Gb of RAM. Install either windows 10/11 and enable storage spaces. Create a mirorred storage space !!! Agreed: not as efficient as parity, but more reliable and very fast. Use enterprise grade hard drives or SSDs and there you go. You got a low power reliable NAS which most probably will outperform a similar priced off the shelf NAS. Advantage: If hardware fails, pull the drives out, connect them to any other windows machine (order in which you attach does not matter) and boom... you are up and running again.
In my opinion the above is a very underrated solution as all YT channels focus on TrueNas etc... which requires quite some knowledge to run.
For my NAS and other IT systems in my home, I always think: if something happens to me, either my wife or kids need to be able to get at least to the photos and personal stuff and they need to be able to keep internet up and running. So keep it stupid simple, safe and reliable (yes, potentially with the cost of a couple of more disks when it comes to the NAS, but at least they can connect the disks to any PC in the home and access whatever is on it as long as they have the user credentials...0
Above solution is NOT for content creators requiring 100+ TB of storage which can be accessed at the speed of light for real time editing of videos of course... 🙂
These homelab dweebs don't care about power use because they've got sponsorships and Patreon. Why else would any sane person have a 42U rack full of off-lease quad socket servers in their basement just for PiHole and Wireguard?
I have tried both. The biggest difference is reliability. If you want something that just works, go off the shelf. If you want to tinker, have fun rolling your own. I would not recommend Windows, especially the home version, for live recording with Plex. I do use Synology for Plex, but only as a home server.
My problem with using old desktops is the power consumption. For someone like me who lives in a warm climate with a really well insulated house, the power consumption and heat from a desktop running 24/7 is a nonstarter.
yeah when you need to run air conditioning you need to look at low power/efficient solutions and can't really reuse old stuff.
There are very cheap mini PCs with n100/n200 Intel CPUs and 2.5Gbe networking. Those are great as a NAS device with DAS over USB.
You can get intel cpu chips and amd that run low power about 35 watts or get the board Jeff has and it's a mobile cpu also ryzen low power stat is crazy good.
This, my downclocked old pc parts with all power saving options enabled still used 4-5x more power than my aftermarket NAS (same drives). With the rising power costs here, I made the money I spent on my NAS back within a year due to power savings.
I think people should really evaluate a NAS. If you don't need access to all that data all the time I don't know why a person would want that data mounted in the first place.
Having an eSata port is a wonderful thing. Most ATX MBs will give you a PCIe slot at the bottom that won't have conflicts with the GPU, that run through the chipset. In fact you can buy a connector that will hook up an internal SATA port and run to the back panel and give an eSATA port. This gives a connection to the outside world that's a little more friendly than USB (I've had issues using USB sometimes).
Good info, fair. Most of us would have old PCs - I have 3 - that can be cannibalised. That saves $1k. Other than the size of old tower. The buy vs build cost is standard - go to a restaurant, vs cook own meal. It's always cheaper to DIY, but the penalty is time. You're basically buying time.
The best thing about DIY is you can keep hot pockets in the bays instead of HDD's
I'm more of a Elios Pizza Pocket guy but the beauty of diy is that you can contain any pastry based food item you want.
I ran my own NAS/Homeserver for many years (was VIA Epia based, if somebody still remembers these guys)... but though I had enough Linux admin-knowledge came to the decision, that I would prefer to spend my free-time otherwise and bought a Qnap NAS. Besides the significantly reduced admin-effort, this solution also is more efficient, than my self-build system and saving ~10W in a System running 24/7 also sums up over the livespan of the system and at Europe energy-costs means you can invest 100-150€ more into the purchase-price of the Synology/QNAP NAS, if it is more efficient.
I use a cheap Terramaster nas with tiny red pill bootloader for Synology OS 7. Been running solid for years. With nvme cache and Synology cloud access.
I agree with Jeff. Have a lot of large drives 12-20TB it's gotten cheaper to be a good data hoarder. Not sure the old 1tb-3tb what to do with other than redundancy.
You could throw them in a ZFS pool and use them as one drive. (ZFS stands for Zettabyte File System.)
ZFS addresses some issues that RAID has since ZFS is both a file system and a logical volume manager. ZFS has been in improved upon for decades and is seen as reliable legacy software. (SUN Microsystems started development of ZFS in 2001.)
Old hardware can be recycled into PC flipping. If you already have most of the parts you can build a system on the cheap, slap in a 3 tb hard drive that's been fully cleaned, to pair with a 256gb SSD, and you're good to go for selling it.
Best thing i did was take the time to build my own plex server using unraid vs a synology. For the same money i built something with 8 times the ram and the ability to transcode 5 4k streams at once (the synology would struggle with 1) not to mention i have 11 bays vs the 8 bay synology i was looking at. This was only my 3rd build. It took me an Afternoon to put together and get it set up. I understand some people may not even have that much free time but i think most people get overwhelmed by the thought of building a pc but its surprisingly easy.
Do you mind sharing a parts list/summary? I am leaning towards DIY.
parts list or gtfo?
@@utmichael2008 sorry I never saw this till now. Core i5-10400, asus tuf gaming b560m mobo, silicon power 1tb ssd,32gb team group ddr4 ram, 32gb, febsmart 6 port sata card with asmedia chip confirmed to work with unraid, fractal define r5 case with 8 bays, icydock 3 bay hotswatp cage for dual 5.25" bay, a few noctua fans, Thermaltake 750w tough power psu. I could've skimped on some of those items like psu and mobo and cpu and been fine but still was around the 1k mark. The cost to put 9 18tb disks in it was around 3 grand though. It runs unraid with 2 of the drives dedicated to parity. Ive run it nonstop for 2 years without issue.
@@user-ih6oe9ny3j I replied to other comment above with the parts used. Honestly any 10th gen or higher intel cpu with quicksync, decent ddr4 ram and 1tb ssd for cache in a fractal case will smoke any pre-built nas. The money is in the storage. I'd recommend using a lsi sata card in IT mode from artofserver on ebay over a standard sata expansion card like I used though.
@@jakethesnake1023162 TB storage is insane. 💀💀 And you eventually have to replace them with back ups right? That's a lot of money 🤯🤯
I like my Synology DS920+ & DX517 expansion unit. I could easily throw some drives into one of my 14 (15 once I find a replacement CPU i9-9900KS or even i7-9700K), but the problem I always run into is a good networking software.
What is the title of the video Jeff spoke of around 4:20 about the 80tb using tiger lake he built? Can't find it on his page please help! 😢 4:24
@therealbkbLAde did you find it?
I just got my first computer a few months ago. I’m definitely building my own nas this month. I don’t know much but with all the information online and help in forums I think it’s very doable
Assembling your own NAS certainly is more fun, especially the software-side of it.
If you’re just storing files or setting something up for family, off the shelf is fine. It’s quick and easy.
If you’re doing beyond just network storage then DIY and learning how to maintain it is going to be the better long term solution.
Pick your solution or parts for your task and situation.
Maybe you just need a 2-4 disk standalone box. Or you might be looking at a 8-12U rack with a disk shelf and multiple thin clients and a UPS, or just a full depth full height rack loaded up with everything.
There is no 1 size fits all. That’s why we’re PC users.
I'm amused by the fact no one is mentioning the planned obsolescence of turnkey NAS caused by lack of firmware updates (I'm looking at you Synology but others are guilty of it too). It's a Network Attached Storage. It has to run securely on the Network so it needs regularly updated firmware else you lose a lot functionality because you can´t connect your server to the Internet anymore. That's the thing with DIY, as you're running of the shelf hardware and not proprietary hardware you'll never be stuck with EOL solutions. And you'll never get stuck with controllers that are unable to run bigger drives because the NAS wasn't built at the time to handle their size.
Where do you buy your storage? Was the $1000 including the 80T of storage? I'm looking at building my own solution as well.
He normally does a lot of enterprise refurbished / recertified on Ebay and alike. Sas drives are also normally a little cheaper but require an hba / raid card (you would want the hba or if you go the raid card you would want it in hba mode)
@@Dgodwin94 thank you! I didn't know that retired enterprise hardware was sold on ebay. Is there a specific flag/tag to look up? Or just searching "enterprises refurbished" will do the job?
@sliphere011 just look for hours on and test your hardware when you get it for ebay's refund policy.
I luv my Synology NAS'es and they've been running reliably for years but their recent stance to force users to use their own Synology HDDs/SSDs/etc. is making me think of just going with a different brand or just DIY my own for the next upgrade. 😔
They also won't stand behind their drives. I have a 920+ and the Synology NVMe cache was corrupting the data. I proved it by removing them and it worked fine, whereas as soon as I put in the Synology NVMe it corrupted my Plex database. They were brand new and they wouldn't replace them or accept any responsibility. Now that I need a 12-16 bay NAS, there is no way I will go Synology.
@@ryanmalone2681 That sux! Yea! Synology don't realize they will be loosing more business by being greedy and now not even supporting their own products that are forced upon us. 😮💨
@@ryanmalone2681 What brand will you use instead or are you going to build your own NAS?
@@ProphetChuck8471 bought some Supermicro 36 bay servers. Next time I will build my own using consumer CPU and Silverstone cases.
i wen't pre built because i couldn't find a good priced case that fits my specifications (as small as possible, ideally sound deadening, atleast options for 4x 3..5" HDD) and by the time i put together what hardware i was thinking i was already matching a prebuilt but still lacking any software solutions. (since it's practically an always on device i'd use the latest/most efficient hardware over some old cheap but power burning hardware).
that said i have had to swap my dual core synology for a quadcore asustor, plex / jellyfin worked fine but pi-hole was actually capable of pushing the dual core to it's limit XD but i still only spent about 450 euro (no HDD's).
was also nice because synology really dragged on allowing OS install's on the M2 SSD's, i have no use for a SSD cache but running the OS of a SSD is never bad. which is what i now have with my asustor, my OS and docker containers all run from the SSD and when i start to watch a show on jellyfin my HDD's wake up (WD red +'s so they can be awake 24/7 but i doubt a nap now and then is going to kill them). i hated how PLEX kept my NAS/hdd's busy 24/7 doing god knows what so switching to jellyfin was also a much kinder use of it's resources.
Interesting. I dunno, what’s the power consumption of an off the shelf NAS vs the homebrew NAS++ thing. I just want a safe place to stash my files. If I want to Plex or self host, I’ll build something specific.
Was looking a Synology until I found out that it is going to give me issues for not paying stupid price for their branded hard drives and not my own. So back to looking just rolling my own.
I believe that’s only their business nases, not the ones you are likely to buy. But verify before buying.
The most important parts of a NAS are network and storage. Secondary size, cpu and energy usage depending on use case. As for DIY NAS I found it difficult to find a suitable mainboard. Today you probably want to use SATA and/ or NVMe SSD. In that case 1 or 2 2.5 GbE port would be the absolute minimum for networking, 10 or 25 SFP+ the optimum. If you even think about a DIY NAS you probably want at least 4 SATA ports. There is no way to get a mainboard with these features onboard. Today moainboards have often only 4 SATA ports and probably a single 2.5 GbE. So several PCIe slots with at least 4 lanes or more are needed (16x with bifurcation for 4x M.2 card, 4x for a single port 10GbE card, maybe another for storage controller). In the consumer spaces we are talking about ATX form factor or above. In my case I either end up with another main PC build with special software or to buy a professinal NAS for way above 1.000€. For professional use I would go with either NAS or storage server. A storage server would give the freedom of OS choice. NAS OS typically only support basic RAID configurations. In my use case I decided against both, put more storage in my main PC, use my old NAS for cold storage and just wait for the times to come.
I made a nas 4 myself using an old PC and put OpenMediaVault on it. But if I do it for a friend, it will likely be a QNAP nas.
I am looking for around 30tb and be able to stream plex on up to 12 devices at once at 1080p with ease. The prebuilt seems incredibly weak on the cpus and i dont know how many devices they can handle at once. Money is not really the issue for me.
When Jeff mentioned SLAs, I couldn’t help thinking, well, just make it redundant. Have two servers either sharing storage or being the redundancy. 😂👨🏼🏫
Jellyfin or Plex aren't built for that. They can't share a database. Sure, you can have two servers, but then you deal with two accounts per user, two play queues etc
It's weird people keep talking about Plex for DIY stuff while Jellyfin exists.
Until jellyfin works with Samsung tizen and is more stable on apple tv would be nice. Then I can make the switch
Excellent questions! Every question I would ask. Thank you so much. I'm not knowledgeable enough for an off-the-shelf. And this video just confirmed it! 😂 Keep up the great content!!
What about graphics, is it worth hetting a graphics card for a nas? Does it help at all?
As a professional programmer, my income stream is based in developing and maintaining a corporate API that has to run 24/7. Since there are only so many hours per day I can devote to technology, tinkering with home-brew is not on my agenda. I'm always first looking for turnkey solutions with shallow learning curves, even if they cost more $$ up front and aren't the be-all end-all solution. There are no free lunches and your time is the most valuable of prices to pay.
OK, I do have an A/V issue for either of you (Adam) or Jeff, after a VLC player update in October/November 2023, and since then I've had issues with audio cutting out for 3 to 5 seconds in RANDOM intervals when listening to TV shows or Movies that are streaming from my Synology. I've Uninstalled/Reinstalled VLC, I've checked the VLC Reddit boards and tried all the settings and still there are times when the Audio drops out (the video keeps playing). Any ideas 💡?
Check the windows error log as soon as you can after an event. This sounds like an audio driver could be crashing. Normally it takes a little longer than that for a driver to recover, but it’s not unheard of.
@firecwby1999 Thanks for the suggestion but I think it was one of my 2TB NVME boot drives, as it ended up taking the entire bootloader down with it 3 weeks ago. I sent it in for warranty and put another 2TB NVME in that system, had to reload Windows and ALL my software (which I was not happy about, next time I think I'll make an ISO of the drive and keep it on the NAS), but the AUDIO problem is gone, which is about the only positive experience from this so let that be a lesson, keep a backup ISO of your main drive.
I’m wanting to digitize my dvd collection for personal use and have an effective storage solution. I am wanting a system that would give me scraped data similar to netflix(ie-movie summary, case artwork) Does anyone know of a good solution?
TrueNas Scale for plex and photoprism or jusr get a synology so i can back up photos from cell phones. Its really the hassel of learning how to config that
I build a TrueNas Scale system and never got it really stable. The network share works but I’ve had a lot of problems with apps, vm’s and the main gui freezing. I might have some bad hardware, but I don’t think it’s _only_ that.
If I had set it up today I would gave used Truenas Core or bought a Synology.
What is the phone he is using? Seems perfectly flat on the becnh with front camera. is it zenfone with a case?
You get so much more for the money by building your own. I built my own FreeNAS box using brand new server hardware, ECC memory, and Xeon cpu and its been running for the most part of a decade. I've had to resilver a few HDs over the years but that's it. When I build a second machine, I'll be upgrading that to TrueNAS. Once that's up and running I'll upgrade the old nas to TrueNAS too and use the new server for proxmox. The old nas will remain as my production nas.
Many off the shelve NAS's can do plex perfectly fine without having to deep dive on building your own. It's a massive undertaking and suggest avoiding it unless you really want to spend weeks learning and research on hardware.
Actually, only the good off-the-shelf ones can deal with on-the-fly transcoding easily: the consumer level ones are riddled with old Celerons or worse, ARM CPUs that were used on circa-2017 phones with 512 MB to 1 GB of RAM that are pathetically weak to do anything other than be used as a fileserver. See the Asustor AS1102T or the Synology DS220j to have a good idea of what I am talking about. Once you start budgeting for a decent Synology unit, you start to get into the price range of powerful DIY setups that will outperform that Synology by 10-fold.
@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 Sure but at that point you should just buy a proper server.
@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 I mean a decent NAS with an i3 or I9 is $2000 USD or more and at this point you can just but a computer for much less.
@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 what's the purpose of transcoding though? If I wanted to get a NAS so I can stream my movie collection through infuse on the apple tv do I need to transcode anything or can't it just stream the movie as if I was watching it on a 4k blu ray player?
@@AGILISFPV Having live transcode capabilities grants you the ability to reproduce the media no matter what: whether the codec used for the source files is supported by your player or not or in cases where the media player offers very limited codec support (think web browsers or older smart TV appliances). But it can also come handy when, for example, you are trying to watch movies from a remote location and thus the stream is transcoded from, say, 4K down to 720p for smoother playback. Indeed some players do have the ability to handle the stream "as is" but the media server software usually tries to determine that on a case by case basis and then serves whatever it thinks is best for the situation.
taking a bong rip through my custom liquid cooler every time they say "roll your own"
Turn your old computer into a NAS storage by installing a suitable version of Linux on it when support has run out for your Windows OS e.g. Windows 7 and 8.1 era machines that have decent multi core support. Minimal change needed
It’s a great way to start. Keep in mind the electric cost though, in some cases it can be cheaper to buy new (or newer) hardware due to lower electricity usage. But I think it’s great if you can start with what you have and then learn if you want to upgrade or switch to a prebuilt nas.
@@PatrikKron if running it as a Nas you can probably underclock your processor, run it in energy efficiency mode, enable the iGPU, remove any PCI-E cards except network cards, replace the power supply with a better rated one or one made for small form factor, that might make a little difference
You can have some fun with a Synology Nas if you want to get into it. After all its just linux!
I got a 2008 Mac Pro with 4 drive bays with 2 xeons and 64gb of ram for the same price as the 4 bay synology. I host game servers, plex, etc.
I am a fan of Jeff for a long time. But recently I found that NAS cases are priced in a way that the whole build end up more expensive than the regular 4bay NAS on Amazon. Unless you are prepared to use non hot swappable trays, (atypical NAS) then may be you, can make it cheaper.
Build! just built mine, it will Smoke 99% out there
Have one of each! for more backups
Iv found that an n100 mini pc has made a great plex server in my home for £100
Same (except I run Jellyfin). I am running Proxmox on mine - after an upgrade to 16GB of RAM - with several LXCs containers and a few VMs and it runs like a champ. I love my Beelink!
@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 really good little machine for the money! Probably my best computer purchase of 2023 imo
I can't find one that cheap. I found one that's close but just a barebone kit.
Great video
I would agree if you can and understand hardware and software DIY is a way
Jeff, where’s the beer?
I really hate when people Express enthusiasm for the DIY aspect but then want to shy away from having to learn how to do something like everything else in life you're not going to know how to do everything perfectly the first time it's a learning experience so learn
simple: if you're asking such question in first place, you probably should not build your own :D
NAS means network attached storage, and if you're planning to tinker with important and sensitive data, good luck having proper backup strategy :P
Power consumption is one of the biggest problems.
Skill set is another problem with self built. How many technicians know the importance of zfs or cloud bucket backup solutions.
I have a DS920+ and it can do hardware transcoding just fine. 🤷🏾♂️
that one has a intel CPU with GPU, the 923 has an AMD without GPU
@@salto1994I know this. I watched this video over a month ago so I'm not sure if they brought up the 923+ and I commented about having a 920+. Either way there are still affordable options options with Quick Sync, like the 423+.
Only liking and commenting out of respect for Jeff.
TrueNAS is the answer
My frustration is configuring the permissions on the existing computers
I'd like to add to the discussion (I'm 30s in) ... and that is NVME (or SATA6, I suppose) NAS purely aimed at media storage for playback and nothing else.
Surely there is a cheap way to do this, but I'm unable to find a way that doesn't either cost the earth or make more noise than my mother at a hairdressing salon. Bearing in mind that the solution will require at least 2.5gbe and passive cooling.
There's some good things coming from the SBC land like the FriendlyELEC CM3588 ... but the issue that comes is the lack of a truly opensource OS. I won't use the OS images supplied by these companies because of trust issues, and prefer that there is a properly opensource way to do things since I have security concerns there.
There are four-bay NVMe cases with Thunderbolt/USB 4 out
Asustor Flashtor 6 (FS6706T)
@@jerryguizar7073Yeah, cheap at half the price 😉
@@greatwavefan397Aye ... I know ... but ... NAAAAAAAASSSS ;-)
It really depends on how much storage you want and how fast it needs to be. CWWK who makes pretty much all of the small router boards that come out of china has a 4x m.2 PCIe x1 board that can be put in the 4 port Alder Lake-N version. So long as you could work out cooling that would get you 4x 2.5gb ports + 4x M.2 in a small passive case for probably around $250 USD (you just need to provide memory and storage).
Haha 😂 he said $1,200... I think I have over $3,000 just in the 9 HDD in my Synology NAS, plus the cost of the 2 Synology boxes.
If you've got gear and access to plenty of replacement parts, roll your own. For most people they'll be better served buying an off the shelf NAS.
Run your workloads somewhere other than your NAS. Keep your functions as atomic as you can.
That would increase the amount of devices owned by someone significantly since if I want to run a bunch of VMs and also to store media and then stream it via Plex then I have to own multiple devices and they should have decent power since they too should be capable of handling the workload
@@vivekthegreat67 Host your VMs on a VM host, not a NAS system.
Space invader one for unraid videos
I would like to say that most people that want a NAS for their home are not the people that will be commenting here.
They just want a safe place to keep stuff and host media. They don't need to virtualise their life or whatever. ;-)
Please don't speak for other people you may want not to diy but not everyone is like you.
@@bushi1147I'm literally doing the opposite of that.
@eliotcole Do you not understand the words you write? I seriously ask as a question, not a statement.
I believe either the expert is coming from an agenda or he has no idea of current QNAP offerings. QNAP has options with 32 XEON cores 1TB of RAM and 24 U.2 bays. They also have entry-level systems and intermediary packages like the QNAP TS-h973AX or stronger like the QNAP TVS-h1288X with a 6 core Xeon W-1250 at 3.3ghz and up to 128GB of RAM. It also has 8 bays for HDD, 4 for SATA SSDs, and 2 for m.2 The TVS-h1288X also supports ethernet over Thunderbolt with an optional card. So plenty of options.
At what cost
The next gen NAS will be intergating NAS with your optical cable wifi modem router and VM support
Adding any program on Synology is not much different than Truenas DIY.
As for software - get Unraid and be done with it.
NICE
Up and running in An afternoon for a first build? No...
if u have lots of free time and patience to mess around build it yourself, if u just want something that work and not interested in wasting your time, a set it and forget it, buy synology or something and save urself some time and headache, and go fishing or smth
Talk about a brother from another mother...
you people are crazy thinking people would spend anything more than $200 on a full server. any shitty old PC will work
I absolutely hate IT appliances. Build your own. NO Synology. No Drobo, an open source custom ZFS system will kill them performance wise and reliability wise if done right, and can be recovered using any system you can hook up a drive to, you don't need some proprietary system. It's a no-brainer.
Totally disagree with this guest. Off the shelf for something like Plex is perfectly fine. Have zero issues with it
Actually, only the good off-the-shelf ones can deal with on-the-fly transcoding easily: the consumer level ones are riddled with old Celerons or worse, ARM CPUs that were used on circa-2017 phones with 512 MB to 1 GB of RAM that are pathetically weak to do anything other than be used as a fileserver. See the Asustor AS1102T or the Synology DS220j to have a good idea of what I am talking about. Once you start budgeting for a decent Synology unit, you start to get into the price range of powerful DIY setups that will outperform that Synology by 10-fold.
I disagree, Jeff knows his stuff, he was careful limiting into price ranges for a reason. A $1000 diy solution can run circles around 90% of off the self units. Some of those being $2k similar
Yes, off the shelf…. Blphphph 👎
I just use the synology for size. and it's ready to go with very little tinkering from me.
"so you've completed your windows inception and you have windows running inside your windows because dog i heard you like windows" that tutorial help me earn more than $2000 dollars in a year. Thank you.