Hi people, I have been looking for a NAS for quite a while now for my home network and I’m now facing a dilema.

I have a few checkboxes to tick to say “that’s the right one”:

  • [ ] can be mounted on rack
  • [ ] can be used as Plex server
  • [ ] supports 10gbit connection

I am also concerned about noise level as I’ll be running this in my living room (no better spot yet) and energy consumption.

Option A: Buying an Actual NAS

I looked a bit into NAS with ARM CPUs as they are more energy-efficient, but they don’t seem to bee suitable for video transcoding. Then I seem to be left with only some Synology options:

Option B: Buying a Rackmount Server

I then found a bunch of very interesting refurbished servers. Not going to show everything I found as it would be pointless, but here’s an example:

DELL R630 8SFF

  • CPU: 2x Intel Xeon E5-2650 v4 (12C 30M Cache 2.20 GHz)
  • RAM: 32Gb 2x16GB DDR4 RDIMM 2133MHz
  • RAID Controller: Dell RAID H730
  • Power Supply: 1xPS 750w
  • Price: 865 EUR

I could even go with lower specs for the purpose of a NAS.

Question

Can you folks please help me look for the right things? Do you have any suggestions? Any other places I could be looking at?

  • umad_cause_ibad@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Are you specifically looking for SFF drive bays? Because my one recommendation about buying a refurbished server is get LFF 3.5 drives. The sff is such a limiting factor.

  • traal@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I use Kodi on an Nvidia Shield TV Pro instead of Plex so I don’t have to transcode. My NAS is an 8-bay Synology DS unit on a rack shelf, it has bigger fans than an RS unit so it’s quieter.

  • MeCJay12@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I can speak to the Synology RS1221+ as I own two. They are great NASs but they are terrible at compute/transcode.

    You missed an important detail which is how much data do you need to store?

    Those big servers are nice and powerful if you can stomach the power bill.

    My current setup is the two Synology’s in an HA pair for storage with a pair of similar spec Hyve servers for compute. If you’re looking for an all in one unit, the big server is the way to go.

    • victorbarbu@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Oh I’d say not a lot of data at the moment. I have two 14 TB disks which I use as replicas. So I have 14 TB of total capacity roughly. I think a 4-bay NAS is good enough for start

  • DogeshireHathaway@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Do not put a rack mount server in a living room, especially a 1U. The boise will never be manageable for that kind of room.

    Also, the server will idle around 100 watts. The NAS much less.

    • victorbarbu@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I suppose that’s what I needed to hear. Thank you very much! Do you happen to know some NAS that does well at transcoding and is within this €1500 range?

      • DogeshireHathaway@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        No, I don’t keep track of consumer NAS as I DIY everything. I can recommend that but I recognize it’s not for everyone. I see that it’s popular to use an Intel NUC or similar as the server hosting Plex and other apps, and leave the NAS simply for storage; that’s very enticing.