NAS Drives ..I need to pick your Brains before i Buy

[baldie]

Hi Guys I need advice..

My good Lady is sick of the 500 plus DVD's that we have on our living room shelves and wants them gone before I decorate . The problem is we still use them if its not me and Mrs Baldie it will be one of the kids in there bedrooms.

So I was thinking a Networked NAS Drive.

How hard will it be to set up ?

How much space will i need ( I am thinking at least 8 TB)

And what software will I need to transfer the films onto the drives. 

I have never set up a NAS Drive before so please keep the reply's Idiot Proof 

I found this on Amazon what do you think ??

Synology DS218J 8 TB 2 Bay NAS Solution | Installed with 2 x 4 TB Western Digital Red Drives: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

 

[RobMc]

1 hour ago, baldie said:

The problem is we still use them if its not me and Mrs Baldie it will be one of the kids in there bedrooms.

Wow, you let the kids watch porn? what an understanding parent?

[Smeggie]

So my first comment about this is that you either have 8TB of unprotected storage, or 4TB of protected storage.

If not setup in a RAID configuration you risk losing a LOT of data if a drive fails.  If you don't care if you lose data, then the 8TB unprotected configuration might be okay.

Two reasons I wanted a home NAS.  1). Ease of access from any computer in the house.  2).  Data protection (i.e. RAID and snapshot backup).  Snapshots are good if someone fat fingers and deletes a file, you can easily recover a file from snapshot backup (deleted files on NAS mounted drives will not go to recycle bin when deleted).

Drobo are popular.  They just didn't have an affordable configuration for the amount of space I needed.

So I purchased a bunch of Western Digital 'RED' drives and downloaded FREENAS (it's free) and have been using it ever since.

I put the RED drives inside an older retired gaming computer and installed FREENAS.  RED drives are designed to be powered on and run 24x7.  Traditional desktop drives are not designed for that purpose.

Lots of tutorials on how to set it up and use it.

I also grabbed a retired disk array from work and connected it externally.

FREENAS picked it right up and now I have 51TB of storage. 

I am comfortable doing this sort of thing as I am a Storage Engineer for a large pharmaceutical company....this is what I do for a living.

 

[Sammy]

I have that model and it works well. Synology has its own 'raid' format. However, if movies are your goal keep in mind that this model doesnt have the cpu power to transcode higher bitrate video for Plex into whatever format your playback device requires. Going from a bluray rip to an ipad likely wont work. Also if it needs things like captions or subs. They need to be burned into the video stream and transcoded if the playback device cant handle it.

And yes, get the RED drives for stability and reliability.

[Slackernet]

synology  IMO is the best. they support their os with many updates and it just works well. I have the 218+ witch is a dual core and it can trans code for plex, but it maxes out easily. the 718+ can trans code and has a quad core processor plus you can  upgrade the ram if you need it.

The 2 things i wish i did different at time of purchase is:

quad core processor

4 bay nas

at the time it wasn't in the budget. I should have been patient and saved up LOL

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Synology-DS718-Bay-Desktop-Unit/dp/B075DB49FN?ref_=ast_sto_dp&th=1&psc=1

 

 

[Labob]

Ok so I run a server for all my music movies tv shows photo's ect. I use something called Plex

For the tv side of stuff its Plex  https://www.plex.tv/

For music if you have a bluetooth or wifi enabled stereo system I use mediamonkey and mediamonkey remote so you can change the music from your phone or tablet anywhere in the house. If your stereo is neither of those Mine is also lack luster I just use bluetooth transmitters a easy thing to do. 

So using those you can run an inexpensive old tower computer as you media storage device. All that for a lot less than a nas a lot less. And that old tower computer is more than capable of serving anything you have. I even serve my house and 3 other house. All they need is anything that can run plex. Most smart tv's already have the app on them all tv boxes can add plex. Its just awesome and its free.  You can even start today on the pc you now have, Add a few movies to a library set up plex on the PC and the TV give it a try.

 

Little disclaimer here I do have 1 gig down and 750 meg up fiber so I don't have an issue with bandwidth. 

  HAve fun My family And grandkids and a few friends love it. I have over  a 1000 movies and I do not know how many tv shows I think I now have more than Prime tv anyway. ( I have been doing this for over ten years though and keep everything) 

[Uranium]

56 minutes ago, Sammy said:

And yes, get the RED drives for stability and reliability.

I concur with the RED drives. I have for storage a synology 4 bay NAS in raid 5 with btrfs file system. The btrfs makes things run slightly slower, but it's better at preventing corruption over time. I have a separate media pc that I use for the plex that reads from the NAS, but I have several people that can access my plex so I wanted something beefer than just using the NAS for hosting.