Selfhost Media server and NAS
from CarlosSpicyWiener@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 20 Jun 02:37
https://lemmy.world/post/31705143
from CarlosSpicyWiener@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 20 Jun 02:37
https://lemmy.world/post/31705143
I would like to make myself a media server and NAS which stores my photoes and files. I have an Optiplex 3070 with a 1 TB Hdd which i plan to use for my media server and want to buy a raspberry pi to use as a NAS for photos and files. What do you think ? will raspberry pi5 be enough, i want something small.
threaded - newest
Do you mean the raspberry pi is going to have all the storage attached to it, with the optiplex just running Plex/JellyFin/Emby?
How many devices will you be streaming to, and what are they? Will you need to transcode any media to play it on other devices?
IMO, don’t buy an RPI. It’s overpriced and missing SATA and PCIE, so you would need to use USB-SATA and it’s not about moving big mount of data.
You might take a look at older Synology or build your own NAS and run TrueNAS on it
I would install truenas scale on the optiplex and run plex or jellyfin as a app from truenas.
Adding a second large drive for redundancy would be good, also a smallish ssd for the truenas os to run from.
My personal setup takes this level deeper. I have a desktop computer running proxmox. proxmox is installed on a nvme drive. I have a VM running truenas that I have passed my sata controller to. So my 2 10TB sata drives and my 500Gb sata ssd show up as native drives in truenas. The 10tb mirror holds my media library and long term backups. The 500gb ssd is for running apps on trunas like plex, syncthing.
I have a 512 gb ssd in the optiplex and 1 tb hdd on sata. Should I upgrade the hdd to a 4 tb and use the optiplex for media server and nas? Using truenas?
I would get multiple drives and do RAID. Here’s a helpful calculator to figure out drive quantity, size, and configuration. The reason to do RAID is redundancy. Hard drives will fail (even NAS branded drives). You do not want your photos, media, etc to be lost in that case. I personally do not go with anything below RAID5 (and for super sensitive things, I’ll even go RAID6 - despite the hit on overall capacity. If the optiplex has drive capacity for multiple drives, I strongly recommend you go this route.
If you have room in the Optiplex for another drive I would definitely get a second spinning drive for storing your media. Truenas will complain about you only having 1 drive for your media. The nice thing about having a pair of drives in a mirror is that is makes it very easy to upgrade in the future. I was running a pair of 6tb drives, until my brother gave me the 10tb ones. I just shut the system down and swapped one of the 6tb for a 10tb and booted it back up. It detected that the mirror was broken and I just told it to use the 10tb drive to fix it. A few hours later after it was done, I did it again with the other drive and then told it to expand the storage to 10tb.
If you want to get a 4tb, you could mirror that to the 1tb, (and you would be limited to 1tb) but you would have redundancy and it would be easy to swap the 1tb for a 4 in the future.
If I were you I would do what I did with proxmox. Install it on the ssd. Create a virtual machine for the Nas with a smaller vitrual disk from the 512gb ssd, 60Gb should be fine, and pass it your graphics card for the media server and the sata drives for your Nas storage and media storage. Then you have your Nas that you can use as a media server and you can also easily spin up new virtual machines to play with or test with.
I have another vm that I use just for docker containers.
I’ve seen some mini PCs by GMKTech that are small form factor and can be reasonable priced. Anyone have experience with those? I’m in a similar position to OP.
I’m not at my house until next week but I have a Minisforum mini PC running portainer with all my media applications running through that and only use the NAS as pure network storage. I can try to answer any questions you have.
Depends on what is inside, intel N100 or better CPUS are considered really good in general. There are some bad CPUs in mini-PCs though. Make sure the hardware has drivers for your choosen OS, not everything supports linux [well] even today. And every once in a while someone makes a PC with bad design and so it doesn't work well for technical reasons.
There are a lot of small PCs that are low power that will work well. I haven't used GMKTech's, and one look at their website says I won't try to navigate that mess. (why does everyone need a subscribe to our newsletter popup blocking my ability to see anything - I avoid anyone who abuses me like that)
Just use the OptiPlex for everything. The RPi lacks the horsepower, and storage capability.
I’m currently using a 7 year old OptiPlex SFF as a NAS, backup point, media converter, and media server. I’ve upgraded the storage drive to 8TB.
I do have another old NAS I use only to duplicate my data store locally (I keep 3 local copies of data, and a cloud backup).
The OptiPlex draws 15w at idle, about 85w when converting video. My NAS draws about 5w at idle. I initially tried serving media from the NAS, but it’s performance is frankly abysmal. Instead I run Media Monkey, Jellyfin, and another media server on the Dell, which has no problem streaming to my crappy Samsung TV (not using an app, just the crappy built-in DLNA client) It works even better with decent devices, like my phone, laptop, iPad.
Your biggest concern with that Dell is the power consumption. As I said, mine happens to draw 15w at idle - I got lucky
What are the specs on your OptiPlex? Is it a mini tower or SFF? That would help more than just telling us the model.
Depending on your sensitivity to failures (drives die) I’d get 2 data drives for the Dell and mirror them, using the current drive just for the OS.
What do you use as a wattage meter?
It’s an i3 6th generation with 16gb ram. I use an ssd adaptor on my x16 pci because the m.2 is not recognizing the ssd.i do not know how to fit multiple hdd on it to get a good redundency
How small? I bought a N100 system from Protectli which I'm happy with. It should work better than a pi according to the specs - but I never tried a pi so I can't say if it really is. However this is bigger than a pi. I have an old system76 Meerkat, which is much smaller (I think this is the NUC form factor?), but my system is 8 years old and so not really comparable to anything modern, but that is an option.
Why have two computers doing basically the same job when you could just have one?
Have the NAS be the media server and save power and get better performance.