NAS Bay (purchase advice )

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AsifSaddique 836

Bronze Level Poster
Hi All

I wasn’t sure which section to post this.

I am wanting to purchase a NAS drive/bay. This is purely to stream/watch HD and 4k content over my smart TV/media player/firestick/ipad after video editing on PC.

I know they can get expensive so I am not entirely sure what my budget is yet to be honest. £300 max maybe?

The main point is that it plays 4k content. I do have high speed internet- that will certainly help!

thanks
 
SpyderTracks

SpyderTracks

We love you Ukraine
AsifSaddique 836 said:
Hi All

I wasn’t sure which section to post this.

I am wanting to purchase a NAS drive/bay. This is purely to stream/watch HD and 4k content over my smart TV/media player/firestick/ipad after video editing on PC.

I know they can get expensive so I am not entirely sure what my budget is yet to be honest. £300 max maybe?

The main point is that it plays 4k content. I do have high speed internet- that will certainly help!

thanks
Click to expand...
£300 will just about get you a very basic bay, but no drives.

The drives alone will be about £250 each, and you really want a minimum of 4 bays.

You can get lower spec entry level ones, but they're only suitable for file storage, not as a media server.

For media server encoding you need a decent CPU, and quite a lot of RAM, which pushes the cost up exponentially.

For a reasonable 4k media server NAS setup, you're looking around £500 for the bay and around £1000 for drives.
 
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AsifSaddique 836

Bronze Level Poster
Wow and there’s me looking at WD mycloud ex2 thinking that will do that job.

Maybe I should scrap that idea ? That cost is insane for a hobby
 
SpyderTracks

SpyderTracks

We love you Ukraine
AsifSaddique 836 said:
Wow and there’s me looking at WD mycloud ex2 thinking that will do that job.

Maybe I should scrap that idea ? That cost is insane for a hobby
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They're expensive initiallly, but it's exactly the same as a PC, that's what they are, they're micro servers. If you design it right at the outset, it will last many many years. If you underspec it, it will perform poorly and you'll need to swap it out after a year or so.

You can spend any amount from £100 to many thousands, but just anything isn't going to fit any usage, you have to design to what you're requiring out of it.

4k streaming and encoding takes a lot of CPU power, so you need quite a beefy NAS bay with an i7 or Ryzen 2000 processor. You'll also need a minimum of 8Gb ECC RAM which is expensive. For any kind of encoding system, you also need a dedicated NVME accelerator cache drive which is another £120 or so.

They're big systems in a small package.

People assume with computing you can spend minimum money and get something that will work. It's just not like that, you have to design it to fit your requirements.
 
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AsifSaddique 836

Bronze Level Poster
Can hard drives be added later say if I bought a bay which takes 4 drives and I initially bought 1 hard drive with it, that would bring the initial cost down?

my other alternative would be to buy a quality external SSD , xfer the media and plug that in my TV/media players.
 
SpyderTracks

SpyderTracks

We love you Ukraine
AsifSaddique 836 said:
Can hard drives be added later say if I bought a bay which takes 4 drives and I initially bought 1 hard drive with it, that would bring the initial cost down?
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You have to have a minimum of 2 drives to enable RAID (which all NAS drives run on) and they have to be the same drive.

AsifSaddique 836 said:
my other alternative would be to buy a quality external SSD , xfer the media and plug that in my TV/media players.
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I would personally recommend doing what I do, have a dedicated NAS drive in your computer, and run a media server like Plex to serve your home or over internet. It's crazy easy to setup, free, and doesn't use much resources off the PC.

That way all you need to invest in is a good size NAS drive/s to accommodate your media library. You're only limited by how many 5 1/4" drives your case can house and motherboard has SATA ports available.

Plex is incredible, far far far better than Kodi (which is rubbish by todays standards), far more configurable and stable.
 
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AsifSaddique 836

Bronze Level Poster
Right so that would slot into my PC and Plex would act like a server?

Sorry im asking again if you don’t mind any links to which you recommend on Amazon?

I’ll consider 4 -6-8 tb capacity depending on price.

So far I have brought stuff on recommendations from here and would like the same if you can choose/send me some links from Amazon plz.
 
SpyderTracks

SpyderTracks

We love you Ukraine
AsifSaddique 836 said:
Right so that would slot into my PC and Plex would act like a server?
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As already advised a NAS drive is just a higher rated HDD, nothing more, it's just got higher read and write endurance as it's designed to be on and accessed 24/7. It's almost equivalent to a server grade HDD.

Plex is a media server software, it handles all the encoding and library display.

 
SpyderTracks

SpyderTracks

We love you Ukraine
Just a little additional piece of info, if going with Plex, or any other media server, I would strongly recommend getting a dedicated drive to install it to and host the database.

It's something I wish I'd done at the outset, although with Plex it is fairly easy to move the database.

The reason for this, in Plex you can setup user accounts just like you'd have on Netflix or somewhere, and it tracks your viewing history, so will mark items as watched, or if you've only part watched, will keep a link to where you last left off, shows currently watched shows and films at the top of the home page, various things like that.

Also, occasionally, sometimes plex won't correctly attach the right thumbnails of cover art, or incorrectly match the video details (this is incredibly rare), or you'll have to amend the title as it's not correctly formatted within the file itself. The database holds all these changes.

The last thing you want is to have to reinstall windows and lose your entire plex database depending on how much you've manually configured it.
 
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AsifSaddique 836

Bronze Level Poster
Ok well the NAS drive would be just for this purpose so I could install Plex on this.

Im am going to do some further googling on this as this is all alien territory for me especially Plex. But this definitely is a cheaper alternative. Does your stream 4k without any issues?
 
SpyderTracks

SpyderTracks

We love you Ukraine
AsifSaddique 836 said:
Ok well the NAS drive would be just for this purpose so I could install Plex on this.
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You wouldn't want that, it would massively affect performance. You never store applications / databases on the same drive as data as it creates a bottleneck with too many queue calls. Plus you want the database on an NVME SSD, not HDD.

AsifSaddique 836 said:
Does your stream 4k without any issues?
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I don't stream in 4k, just 1080p, but your PC specs would easily handle 4k without issue. It's down to the quality of your network as to how good it would stream.
 
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AsifSaddique 836

Bronze Level Poster
SpyderTracks said:
You wouldn't want that, it would massively affect performance. You never store applications / databases on the same drive as data as it creates a bottleneck with too many queue calls. Plus you want the database on an NVME SSD, not HDD.


I don't stream in 4k, just 1080p, but your PC specs would easily handle 4k without issue. It's down to the quality of your network as to how good it would stream.
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Im confused didn’t you state ‘getting a dedicated drive to install it to and host the database’ ? and is the hard drive link above a NVME SSD drive?

Will my PC have space for another of these drives,? My second drive is 2TB INTEL® 670p M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD (up to 3500MB/sR | 2700MB/sW) in my setup.
 
SpyderTracks

SpyderTracks

We love you Ukraine
AsifSaddique 836 said:
Im confused didn’t you state ‘getting a dedicated drive to install it to and host the database’ ? and is the hard drive link above a NVME SSD drive?
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No, the NAS drive is purely for the media files.

You would need a dedicated SSD for the application and database.

AsifSaddique 836 said:
Will my PC have space for another of these drives,? My second drive is 2TB INTEL® 670p M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD (up to 3500MB/sR | 2700MB/sW) in my setup.
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Assuming you ordered the Strix board, that has 2 M2 slots so no, they're occupied.

In that case a 2.5" SATA SSD would be the minumum for a dedicated media server installation.
 
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AsifSaddique 836

Bronze Level Poster
Ok thanks alot. I will not order anything yet until I get my new system up and running and have a play with it first. I may get back to you incase I need further advice. Thanks
 
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