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H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006


Residency Evil posted:

What's the best (relatively simple to set up, headless, requires minimal upkeep) solution for a home media server storage solution? I have an apple TV and would like to use something like Plex for streaming. Would a synology be ok for this? Would it be able to do 4k?

The file serving would be fine on a Synology but I think the underlying question is "something that can transcode to 4k for my apple TV" which is either a Synology + high end nuc or unraid on a regular computer w/ a decent cpu with a lot of hard drives.

astral
Apr 26, 2004



You basically don't need to transcode for the appletv if you have paid third-party video player app "Infuse". Works as a Plex client.

caberham
Mar 18, 2009

by Smythe


Grimey Drawer

Synology would be great. As for 4k, the 918+ does handle it no problem BUT you have to pay for a Plex premium pass

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.



Fun Shoe

astral posted:

You basically don't need to transcode for the appletv if you have paid third-party video player app "Infuse". Works as a Plex client.

Also I use a QNAP nas and the appletv app for it only seems to have problems if the audio is encoded to Dolby Atmos (or whatever the 3d audio format is - I have the first apple tv that supports app store).

bobfather
Sep 20, 2001

I will analyze your nervous system for beer money

astral posted:

You basically don't need to transcode for the appletv if you have paid third-party video player app "Infuse". Works as a Plex client.

Or if you have a Mac (or can virtualize one), you can pretty easily install Xcode and then use Automator to sideload Kodi on a regular basis.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

Bless You Ants, Blants



Fun Shoe

The "Play" series Synology NASes have hardware in them designed to do transcoding, so you don't necessarily need to buy one with a really beefy CPU.

caberham
Mar 18, 2009

by Smythe


Grimey Drawer

Native photo or video station can transcode 4K videos but for Plex you need a premium pass for the same feature

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006


Thanks Ants posted:

The "Play" series Synology NASes have hardware in them designed to do transcoding, so you don't necessarily need to buy one with a really beefy CPU.

Oh there you go. Get this and a lifetime plex pass at full price.

caberham
Mar 18, 2009

by Smythe


Grimey Drawer

From the PLEX forums, not sure if this issue has been corrected but you need to do a few things yourself through the package manager for flawless 4K hardware transcoding:

1. Add the PLEX repository and trust it
2. Download the 64 bit version
3. Install Plex
4. Go to PLEX settings and enable hardware transcoding (requires Plex premium)

teagone
Jun 10, 2003

That was pretty intense, huh?

Have a few questions about adding an LSI 9211-8i card to my Plex server as I've never used any kind of controller card before. My Plex server is a Windows 10 PC and currently has 7 HDDs installed used for storage that are pooled together using StableBit DrivePool. 5 of the drives are internal, running off the motherboard's SATA ports, and 2 of them are external USB SATA drives. I plan on shucking the two externals and installing them in the PC since the case has plenty of drive bays, and also now because I was generously given an LSI SAS host bus adapter.

My question is, can I simply disconnect the HDDs from the motherboard, connect all the drives to the LSI controller, boot up, and everything will continue to work as they already do? Will the HDDs retain their drive letters and will DrivePool detect them without issue? Or do I need to do some setup beforehand? What steps should I take before connecting the drives to the LSI card? It's already been flashed to IT mode, and I have the appropriate fan out cables to connect the drives. As a side note, I'll also be replacing the motherboard in my server this weekend, should that factor into the process.

eames
May 9, 2009



Amazon Europe has the 2TB Crucial MX500 on sale for 239€ today. If prices keep dropping like that it won't be long until it makes sense to put these in a NAS. Too bad I don't have a use for them.

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll

Nap Ghost

With the quad-LC NAND SSDs hitting the market we may start seeing prices for SSDs to work for bulk storage in another couple years. For home NASes, SSDs have a lot of characteristics that are great including lower power usage, better effective endurance, no noise, etc. I’ve hoped for a 8x2.5” array embedded in 2x5.25” external bays stuck in a small case and there’s really no commercial product like that besides arguably some rack mounts.

Fancy_Lad
May 15, 2003
Would you like to buy a monkey?

necrobobsledder posted:

With the quad-LC NAND SSDs hitting the market we may start seeing prices for SSDs to work for bulk storage in another couple years. For home NASes, SSDs have a lot of characteristics that are great including lower power usage, better effective endurance, no noise, etc. I’ve hoped for a 8x2.5” array embedded in 2x5.25” external bays stuck in a small case and there’s really no commercial product like that besides arguably some rack mounts.

Something like these would let you convert any 5.25 bay into that, if that's what you mean?

I've been using the MB608SP-B in my system for about a year with no complaints.

eames
May 9, 2009



I'd like to see an updated version of the DS416slim with the internals (and price point) of a DS218+. It'll happen eventually.

redeyes
Sep 14, 2002
I LOVE THE WHITE STRIPES!

Has anyone used a Marvell SATA PCIe adapter with unraid? Amazon reviews say stay away from this combo in favor of a ASmedia 1061.

Smashing Link
Jul 8, 2003

I'll keep chucking bombs at you til you fall off that ledge!

Grimey Drawer

eames posted:

I'd like to see an updated version of the DS416slim with the internals (and price point) of a DS218+. It'll happen eventually.

I think that would be my next buy. SSDs for home use and offsite spinning disks for backup.

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll

Nap Ghost

Fancy_Lad posted:

Something like these would let you convert any 5.25 bay into that, if that's what you mean?

I've been using the MB608SP-B in my system for about a year with no complaints.
I know those exist, the hard part is finding a case that’s got a Mini ITX motherboard and 2x 5.25” bays (to support 16x SSDs for sake of maintenance / buffer for a normal 8-drive array) and nothing else. Most of the cases with such bays nowadays are larger cases.

Atomizer
Jun 24, 2007

Bote McBoteface. so what


necrobobsledder posted:

I know those exist, the hard part is finding a case that’s got a Mini ITX motherboard and 2x 5.25” bays (to support 16x SSDs for sake of maintenance / buffer for a normal 8-drive array) and nothing else. Most of the cases with such bays nowadays are larger cases.

Right, that's because the trend is towards smaller systems overall and the 5.25" bay is obsolete. When is the last time you installed a full-size optical drive? Why would anyone manufacture SFF systems and include a 5.25" bay for no reason (let alone more than one of them?)

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006


teagone posted:

Have a few questions about adding an LSI 9211-8i card to my Plex server as I've never used any kind of controller card before. My Plex server is a Windows 10 PC and currently has 7 HDDs installed used for storage that are pooled together using StableBit DrivePool. 5 of the drives are internal, running off the motherboard's SATA ports, and 2 of them are external USB SATA drives. I plan on shucking the two externals and installing them in the PC since the case has plenty of drive bays, and also now because I was generously given an LSI SAS host bus adapter.

My question is, can I simply disconnect the HDDs from the motherboard, connect all the drives to the LSI controller, boot up, and everything will continue to work as they already do? Will the HDDs retain their drive letters and will DrivePool detect them without issue? Or do I need to do some setup beforehand? What steps should I take before connecting the drives to the LSI card? It's already been flashed to IT mode, and I have the appropriate fan out cables to connect the drives. As a side note, I'll also be replacing the motherboard in my server this weekend, should that factor into the process.

I do not know the answer to this specific case, but since no one else has answered: Connecting the disks to the new controller should be fine as far as data preservation goes. Windows is really likely to shuffle the letters around (I think) but that is re-assignable trivially. I have no idea if your StableBit DrivePool will handle this gracefully if at all. This sounds like a great question for their support.

teagone
Jun 10, 2003

That was pretty intense, huh?

H110Hawk posted:

I have no idea if your StableBit DrivePool will handle this gracefully if at all. This sounds like a great question for their support.

Didn't even occur to me to contact Covecube's tech support. Sent an email just now lol.

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll

Nap Ghost

Atomizer posted:

Right, that's because the trend is towards smaller systems overall and the 5.25" bay is obsolete. When is the last time you installed a full-size optical drive? Why would anyone manufacture SFF systems and include a 5.25" bay for no reason (let alone more than one of them?)
Not disagreeing with the market drivers or anything, I'm just saying that because of the trend, there's now even less likelihood of finding a chassis that can let you run a 16x 2.5" drive setup with minimum volume taken. The great majority of mini ITX systems are for industrial / digital signage purposes (which the NUC has not managed to take out it seems) or boutique desktops like from the SFF / Mini ITX thread getting created from crowdfunding. The few 8x2.5" 5.25" SATA expanders I did see had issues with drives above 7.5 mm in height when most 2TB+ 2.5" magnetic drives are 9.5 mm. The trend away from home NASes is being partly driven by cloud storage being so competitive comparatively, but there's always that sliver of a market that's between 10 TB and 50 TB that would balk at even $.003/GB/mo. I'm mostly saying that in another couple years we may start seeing people building 40TB+ arrays with QLC SSDs. Storage prices in clouds have taken a break while consumption is going up steadily and we can't be sure that the Internet Overlords will be able to lower pricing to make it all competitive.

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





teagone posted:

Didn't even occur to me to contact Covecube's tech support. Sent an email just now lol.

I would expect it to handle it gracefully, but I haven't tried it myself.

Atomizer
Jun 24, 2007

Bote McBoteface. so what


necrobobsledder posted:

Not disagreeing with the market drivers or anything, I'm just saying that because of the trend, there's now even less likelihood of finding a chassis that can let you run a 16x 2.5" drive setup with minimum volume taken. The great majority of mini ITX systems are for industrial / digital signage purposes (which the NUC has not managed to take out it seems) or boutique desktops like from the SFF / Mini ITX thread getting created from crowdfunding. The few 8x2.5" 5.25" SATA expanders I did see had issues with drives above 7.5 mm in height when most 2TB+ 2.5" magnetic drives are 9.5 mm. The trend away from home NASes is being partly driven by cloud storage being so competitive comparatively, but there's always that sliver of a market that's between 10 TB and 50 TB that would balk at even $.003/GB/mo. I'm mostly saying that in another couple years we may start seeing people building 40TB+ arrays with QLC SSDs. Storage prices in clouds have taken a break while consumption is going up steadily and we can't be sure that the Internet Overlords will be able to lower pricing to make it all competitive.

I just think your 16x 2.5" idea is such an extraordinarily niche use-case. Anyone who needs plenty of storage is going to be better served in price & performance with 3.5" HDDs. You're looking at 2 TB max for 7 or 9.5 mm height 2.5" HDDs, anything above that is 15 mm with the fitting problems that entails, and you can get, what, 14, 16 TB in a single 3.5" drive? The price, power, heat, performance, everything just doesn't work out with 2.5" drives. It's another thing to want all solid-state storage, but that's way off the chart in the price dimension, even if QLC was cheap & plentiful.

You can certainly still get a bunch of 5.25" bays in a tower case, which should be fine for anyone wanting tens of TB of storage, but like I said those bays are literally obsolete nowadays and it doesn't even make sense to want that many drives in a SFF setup. What mini ITX setup supports 16 SATA (or SAS I guess) drives? Obviously you'd need an AIC or two, and then you may or may not need to worry about the heat generated (and possibly the power consumed) by 16 HDDs crammed as tightly as possible. Oh and also you'd need to use NAS/enterprise drives that are made to deal with the high-vibration environment of having up to 16(!!!) drives operating all at once. I don't think that type of drive even exists.

I get what you're going for, it just doesn't make any sense in practice.

Broken Machine
Oct 22, 2010



I had a similar idea, and used an old home theater style case, works great. Even a case from 15-20 years ago will still support modern motherboards, I put an mITX in mine.

Atomizer
Jun 24, 2007

Bote McBoteface. so what


Yeah any tower case will work, but he wants 5.25" bays in a modern SFF system, which is pretty nonsense. There are entire systems (e.g. NUCs) that more or less take up the same amount of space as an old, full-size optical drive. It's ludicrous to add huge obsolete bays to a state-of-the-art SFF case when you can just get a tower and stick it in a closet.

BobHoward
Feb 13, 2012

The only thing white people deserve is a bullet to their empty skull


eames posted:

I'd like to see an updated version of the DS416slim with the internals (and price point) of a DS218+. It'll happen eventually.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1310...neup-sneak-peek

It's coming. Will be named DS619slim, and will have 6x2.5" bays and a J3355 Celeron (the same CPU as the 218+).

Sadly, the network connectivity is dual 1GbE. It'd be awesome for it to have 10GbE.

eames
May 9, 2009



BobHoward posted:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1310...neup-sneak-peek

It's coming. Will be named DS619slim, and will have 6x2.5" bays and a J3355 Celeron (the same CPU as the 218+).

Sadly, the network connectivity is dual 1GbE. It'd be awesome for it to have 10GbE.

Oh wow, that looks very interesting. You're right that 10GbE would make a lot of sense in a box like this.
People at home could put a few SSDs in there, skip redundancy and use a single 2.5" HDD for nightly backups, plus "real" backups of course.
Does Synology even support JBOD volumes across multiple drives?

caberham
Mar 18, 2009

by Smythe


Grimey Drawer

My first 218+ had 2 green WD JBOD drives as a single volume and you guys can easily guess what happened next.

I didn’t have a backup and the one of the drives crashed. It was just a server for videos but yeah raid isn’t backup

Snowy
Oct 6, 2010

A man whose blood
Is very snow-broth;
One who never feels
The wanton stings and
Motions of the sense




Fun Shoe

Are there any good deals on 2tb internal drives today?

SuitcasePimp
Feb 27, 2005



BobHoward posted:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1310...neup-sneak-peek

It's coming. Will be named DS619slim, and will have 6x2.5" bays and a J3355 Celeron (the same CPU as the 218+).

Sadly, the network connectivity is dual 1GbE. It'd be awesome for it to have 10GbE.

Holy crap this is exactly what I need! I have a weird requirement for a new NAS that is highly portable, impact resistant, low power, and has plenty of bays for expansion. Raw speed over the network is much less important, this looks like it would be perfect with some 2Tb SSDs. I figure the price of SSDs will continue to drop over time so adding one periodically won't be a big deal.

Ziploc
Sep 19, 2006
MX-5

Oh my fucking god. I just tried to rack a Rosewill 4u. Well, three of them. What a pain in the ass.

The mother fuckers are bigger than 4u. Everyone says their rails are trash and don't line up the box within 4u. And trying 3 different server shelfs had it all take up 4.2U. It takes up enough space that I suspect that even with a perfectly function roller rail (which doesn't exist) it will not fit within 4u. Why the fuck is it called a 4u server?

Good thing I overbought rack space.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.



Fun Shoe

The most important thing for efficient use of space in a rack is to build a 4U rackmount with a bump or extra height at the top of the case (but really do it to be a jerk).

teagone
Jun 10, 2003

That was pretty intense, huh?

H110Hawk posted:

I do not know the answer to this specific case, but since no one else has answered: Connecting the disks to the new controller should be fine as far as data preservation goes. Windows is really likely to shuffle the letters around (I think) but that is re-assignable trivially. I have no idea if your StableBit DrivePool will handle this gracefully if at all. This sounds like a great question for their support.


IOwnCalculus posted:

I would expect it to handle it gracefully, but I haven't tried it myself.

Happy to report that yep, DrivePool was able to detect the drives connected to the LSI card no problem, and everything is exactly how it was before

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006


teagone posted:

Happy to report that yep, DrivePool was able to detect the drives connected to the LSI card no problem, and everything is exactly how it was before

Good to know.

redeyes
Sep 14, 2002
I LOVE THE WHITE STRIPES!

Yeah that Rosewill case is WAY larger than I expected. It would easily mount a dual socket extra large mobo. Having said that, it is super easy to build in. Fans are reasonable. Hot swap bays are just fine.




I needed to buy a 4xSATA PCie card because I didn't look closely enough at that mobo. Still it was on sale for $99 bux and thats a good deal for that board. I also ended up getting a Samsung 32GB USB 3.0 memory stick and connected it to the internal USB 3.0 header. Very nice.
Loaded Unraid and no problems. Formatted the drives and netted 18GB out of 24 total. Using one parity drive. Overall A- on this build because that case has too much dead space.

I'm going to clean up those SATA cables. Don't worry.

redeyes fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Nov 24, 2018

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD
Jul 7, 2012



Fallen Rib

Easystores are $129

Sniep
Mar 28, 2004

All I needed was that fatty blunt...



King of Breakfast


Fun Shoe


That image host sucks donkey balls. Does imgur not work for you?

redeyes
Sep 14, 2002
I LOVE THE WHITE STRIPES!

Sniep posted:

That image host sucks donkey balls. Does imgur not work for you?

Um, ok i'll try and use it.

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





Agreed, I've never seen an image host request to enable push notifications before.

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006


IOwnCalculus posted:

Agreed, I've never seen an image host request to enable push notifications before.

Web browser developers should be shot.

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