After seeing the three Aggie Network Drive posts, figured I'd open up a discussion for a home server thread.

What are the recommendations for a home cloud storage solution?

DYI Unraid route?
Recommended builds?
https://unraid.net

Or Ready made NAS Storage Solution?
Like a Synology Disk Station

I have a 15TB unraid with dual parity and a ssd cache drive. 0 complaints.

Get a synology and call it done you can even get the ones that will run multiple VMs

TrueNAS + Plex (with PlexPass) has been my goto for a while. Roku and AppleTV clients.

In my first iteration with these two, they were combined on a single box, but since then, in my home lab, I've split off Plex to a NUC to take advantage of hardware transcoding.

I've given away my old Netgear NAS units, but used Plex on them for a while with very little problems.

This article may be biased towards Unraid, but seems to offer a pretty good comparison between Synology, Unraid, & TrueNAS

https://9to5toys.com/2021/06/04/unraid-vs-synology-vs-truenas/

I forgot, are you a Synology supplier? Have any discounts?

Between losing my Aggie unlimited storage, Windows 11 requiring a TPM module, and my NAS not being able to handle streaming Plex since Plex Cloud shutdown (almost 3 years ago!?), I think this finally will be my solution! Finally going to be able to pull the trigger on a major PC upgrade and can move the parts over to an Unraid server. Thanks for bringing this to my attention!

jbryan10 said:

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Between losing my Aggie unlimited storage, Windows 11 requiring a TPM module, and my NAS not being able to handle streaming Plex since Plex Cloud shutdown (almost 3 years ago!?), I think this finally will be my solution! Finally going to be able to pull the trigger on a major PC upgrade and can move the parts over to an Unraid server. Thanks for bringing this to my attention!

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If all of your media is already stored on a NAS, possibly consider just running a Plex/Jellyfin/Emby instance and point the media directories to your NAS. Unless you're doing super high bitrate ONLY, you shouldn't come close to maxing out an Ethernet connection. Now if you want other homelab stuff, that might be a good reason to do the upgrades, but I'd personally be more in the TrueNAS plus Proxmox stack.

I'm just finishing up a 112TB (84TB useable) server using some used enterprise parts... 8 core/16thread, 64GB ECC ram in a case with 16 hot swap bays. It's horrendous overkill, but it's been fun.

I bought most of the parts around November or December. I got $190 14TB drives from Best Buy.

I'm going to use ZFS on Ubuntu and run Plex and all the other stuff in docker containers.

nwspmp said:

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If all of your media is already stored on a NAS, possibly consider just running a Plex/Jellyfin/Emby instance and point the media directories to your NAS. Unless you're doing super high bitrate ONLY, you shouldn't come close to maxing out an Ethernet connection. Now if you want other homelab stuff, that might be a good reason to do the upgrades, but I'd personally be more in the TrueNAS plus Proxmox stack.

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I do that currently, but I prefer not to leave my main PC running. Really, the biggest issue with the NAS is that I need to go through and convert all my .mkv files to something direct playable. I do like the flexibility of webhosting and whatever else I can do, but the main reason for upgrading is age. That i7-2600K, while still excellent, is due for an upgrade...

I'm running an I5-3570K and thought that was the oldest system here that sees regular use!

Will be following the whole server thing, that's been on my to-do list for a while and I'd like to use an old Alienware Quad Core with a clean install of Windows 7 for it.

jbryan10 said:

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nwspmp said:

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If all of your media is already stored on a NAS, possibly consider just running a Plex/Jellyfin/Emby instance and point the media directories to your NAS. Unless you're doing super high bitrate ONLY, you shouldn't come close to maxing out an Ethernet connection. Now if you want other homelab stuff, that might be a good reason to do the upgrades, but I'd personally be more in the TrueNAS plus Proxmox stack.

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I do that currently, but I prefer not to leave my main PC running. Really, the biggest issue with the NAS is that I need to go through and convert all my .mkv files to something direct playable. I do like the flexibility of webhosting and whatever else I can do, but the main reason for upgrading is age. That i7-2600K, while still excellent, is due for an upgrade...

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Plex plays mkv directly.

That's good to know!

Also, good sale at Newegg right now on WD Red drives for anyone interested:
https://www.newegg.com/Storage/EventSaleStore/ID-1119?N=100167523&SrchInDesc=wd+red

Oh wow, Synology sold out on Amazon

chip shortage...

Slocum on a mobile said:

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I've been considering building a new box since my old Plex server has TPM 1.2, and this can't be upgraded to win11.
Short of buying an enterprise class box, is there any off the shelf PC I can buy with SAS cards and a bunch of HDD bays?
I haven't built a PC in a decade or so

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If you're using it as a server, you can put linux on it.

Storage server hardware is expensive right now because of the Chia coin mining stuff... Stuff that was a couple hundred dollars is significantly more than that.

You could buy something like this and switch out the motherboard and stuff. The 4u servers are much more popular because they can be pretty easily modified to take 120mm fans that are quieter than the 80mm fans that are usually used in a server environment. There are high efficiency power supplies that are quieter and you can run one PSU instead of two.

I got a 3u chassis and hacked in some 120mm fans to quiet it down and it worked pretty well. I got an enterprise motherboard, processor and ram to put in it that was pretty reasonably priced. You can buy off the shelf, but I think they are overpriced for what you get.

For those of you that are creating rips of all your media, what optical drive are you using? I don't think I have many 4k/UHD discs so not sure that is a driving factor but my old blu ray drive I had crapped out a few years ago when I was trying to digitize and just never got around to getting another.

You can find a 4k capable drive here:

https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=19

TTT now that we have an actual timeline on when Google Drive goes away. NAS seems to be the way to go in my mind.

Starting to look at parts so I can have this up and running prior to June and buy parts during black friday/cyber Monday.

Anyone have experience with ebay parts? Especially hard drives. Thinking I'll just start small with two 4 TB (running one in parity), then build on from there. Seems that I don't need powerful hardware to run this thing and if "old" unused parts will do the trick, especially in the mobo/cpu field, why not?

This is the first time I've researched this so any advice on what to do is appreciated. I'm also open to just receiving a shopping list.

What do I need software-wise for a combo HTPC/network storage?

fav13andac1)c said:

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TTT now that we have an actual timeline on when Google Drive goes away. NAS seems to be the way to go in my mind.

Starting to look at parts so I can have this up and running prior to June and buy parts during black friday/cyber Monday.

Anyone have experience with ebay parts? Especially hard drives. Thinking I'll just start small with two 4 TB (running one in parity), then build on from there. Seems that I don't need powerful hardware to run this thing and if "old" unused parts will do the trick, especially in the mobo/cpu field, why not?

This is the first time I've researched this so any advice on what to do is appreciated. I'm also open to just receiving a shopping list.

What do I need software-wise for a combo HTPC/network storage?

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Hard drives are pretty much the one thing I don't buy used. The cost differential between new and used just isn't there for most media based NAS use.

You mention NAS and then buying/building yourself. You can run NAS distros on conventional PC hardware, but typically "NAS" term is used with purpose-built appliances. Which are you wanting to do?

For appliance NAS units, I've heard great things about Synology, and would trust most of their offerings, but the few I've used in recent years were QNAP. Now, I keep the QNAPs away from Internet, and keep them patched manually each month, but from a functionality standpoint, they typically work pretty well. The TS-453 would be a decent unit; four disk slots, on-board HDMI for driving displays on which you can run and view Plex or just use on-board Kodi to view movies and shows. There is even a direct remote control available or an app on your phone.

Now, that said, even if you go with a NAS, I would recommend keeping it separate and using a dedicated streaming device at the TV rather than a HTPC or NAS directly connected. The app availability is going to be larger and more readily updated. It also offloads a lot of power needed on the NAS; all it has to do is serve up files usually.

Were I looking for a PC dedicated to NAS/Plex/Emby/etc use, I'd probably follow a guide similar to this, and just buy a pre-built machine, used, and do some small upgrades to it, and let that be it.

https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/guide-nas-killer-4-0-fast-quiet-power-efficient-and-flexible-starting-at-125/667/13

The UltraQuiet Plus and 6-Bay mini-ITX builds are decent, and have a good set of tried-and-true parts.

From there, I'd look at https://perfectmediaserver.com/ for a good coverage of the system, and setup of all of the services. Alternatively, UnRAID or OpenMediaVault are decent options for NAS/Media Server software functionalities.

I agree about not wanting to buy harddrives used. If you're running a raid array with multiple redundancy and you can afford to get a couple extra drives to keep as cold spares it can make sense. I wouldn't do it with two drives.

Luckily, harddrive prices are sort of coming down to be closer to normal (chia coin imploding is a good thing, IMO). I haven't followed it that closely, but the best $/TB is around 8 or 10TB drives right now. I was able to get 14TB external drives for $190 a piece around Black Friday last year, but they may not get that low this year.

If you're only serving media files to yourself and you're trying to be cost conscious using one of the builds from the serverbuilds forum makes sense. You don't really have to worry about transcoding too much. I wouldn't even worry about raid if you're just storing media files. If you want to backup files from other computers onto this device, some sort of redundancy is nice to have (but you should also back them up to the cloud.)

I'm a bad example because my setup is overkill, but I'm going to be using it for way more than just plex.

Thank you both for the thoughtful responses. Good to know I should bite the bullet and purchase fresh drives.

I want to say I may be coming at this using the wrong terminology. But to answer your question, what I would want is to be able to stream movies to my roku enabled tv using plex most often, but also have the ability to use the server to store normal files and back them up. In an ideal world I would be able to access these files from anywhere using my phone.

In an even more ideal world, it would be awesome to be able to boot games from my gaming PC using the files stored on the server. Don't even know if this is a thing or is feasible.

I can get discounts on the 2U units. as well as Synology hard drives. Hit me up and I can pull pricing.

andy@andrewadamsav.com

I purchased a Synology DS214 for home use when it first came out and have had zero complaints. Over the years, I've had to replace a defective hard drive but never lost any data. I highly recommend the brand.

Quote:

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home cloud storage solution

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what exactly are we talking here?

a) external hard drive storage in your home
b) external hard drive storage in your home that you can then get to when you are not at your home
c) external hard drive storage in your home that is backed up to the cloud/offsite
d) cloud/offsite storage

Looks to me like folks have external storage in their home, which is great. Until there's a fire. Or am I missing the convo about offsite backup for safekeeping in this post/thread?

Get 2 synology devices put one at your parents house…

They can sync with each other.

What if both houses burn down?

Or what if no parents?

Any other practical suggestions for placing a synology device where an accident that destroys your computer won't also destroy it?

Or what if the parents are estranged from their children?

Sancha's house?

You can also make certain folders sync with cloud as well.

I know how to do it...that isn't my question. My question was more towards - people asking about home storage, and RAID and never losing data, but nobody was really focusing on offsite storage. Wasn't sure if it is because nobody thinks of it and I was just trying to jump in with "maybe you should have an offsite solution if you want to protect your data".

Fair enough. I'd hope that everyone has a dynamic backup strategy. So something physically on-site as well as an offsite backup. I am thinking of my self alone and yeah I have 10k plus pictures from the time my daughter was born, documents and such

QNAP w/ZFS RAID 10 w/ encrypted replication to Amazon Glacier

Jabin said:

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Or what if no parents?

Any other practical suggestions for placing a synology device where an accident that destroys your computer won't also destroy it?

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I used Carbonite for a lot of years, and finally shifted to backblaze about three years ago. I've got B2 running that backs up from my Synology NAS nightly.