Hoping to set up a general location to throw files.
It might be used as a storage dump for Plex too…
Recommendations?
Edit: the synology recommendations have won out. Went with the DS923+. Thanks for all of the thoughtful recommendations!
If you want the best UX and polish, Synology
If you want something rougher around the edges, QNAP
You can always look into building a solution with something like unraid, truenas, or OMV
If choosing Synology look into the Plus series (f.e. DS723+) or you end up with ARM CPUs and lose many of Synologys software goodies.
Their Active Backup for Business software is a nice way to backup the household machines as an example.
As you enter packages in this list you will see which models are supported:
https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/packages
No mentions of TrueNAS (used to be FreeNAS), so I’ll throw that one out there.
Seconding this because my current NAS is dying and I’d like to relocate my LEGITIMATELY OBTAINED MEDIA COLLECTION somewhere else.
Plex seems cool but last time I tried it I couldn’t get it to categorize my non-english movies and shows correctly.
I haven’t explored Jellyfin’s categorization, but could that be an alternative? It’s FOSS
Their metadata provider system by default only has The Movie Database (TMDb) and Open Media Database (OMDb) but they got plugins for more:
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/plugins/#official-plugins
I’ve had some heartache with Plex’s categorization system too, on English language content nonetheless…
I cant imagine the pain of making it work for foreign content.
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Are you looking for a turnkey product or are you open to building your own?
My vote would be for ZFS+Linux, otherwise Synology is pretty damn good.
Knowing my track record for completing projects… turnkey is probably best for me. Haha
Seeing a loooot of recommendations for Synology
Yeah I think you can even get ZFS on some of their products. (I like ZFS) 😄
I have two NAS Solutions, both using raspberry pis running OMV. First one is a single external USB hard drive acting as a buffer when it downloads my legitimately obtained media before transferring its data to the second NAS running two USB hard drives running RAID 1 for deep storage and streaming.
How are you connecting the two drives to the Pi? Do they have external power supplies?
The single drive can power itself through USB. The other server with 2 drives have their own independent power supply. Look up WD EasyStore to get an idea of what kind of model they are.
Thanks! Been on the lookout for good HDDs with external power supply.
Can you link something that explains this more?
I just followed these tutorials and it worked quite well.
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I always rolled my own Debian servers on microitx boards. I found a cheap synology a few years ago though and gave it a shot… I’m a convert for sure. They fully live up to the hype and are absolutely worth the price.
Thanks! Seems like a lot of people (both here on lemmy and elsewhere) recommend synology
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It’s *nix under the hood. You can run docker images really easily on it for extra functionality. I doubt the DSM tooling is open.
I could actually recommend the synology DS220J. super simple, cheap, can run your plex server on it so it’s not tied to your main pc.
You’ll outgrow it quickly but you’ll know exactly what you want in your next nas or if you want to build one instead.
The J can barely run Plex
you can run plex on a potato as long as you don’t need to transcode anything
True, but as tarjeezy says just the UI spiked the CPU. I upgraded from a J to a + last year and the extra bucks were worth it.
My (albeit, somewhat older) j model hits 100% cpu just logging into the web UI. Synologys are nice, but definitely stay away from their budget models.
I recommend Unraid. Especially if you want to host a bunch of dockers as well.
Minor nit here - “docker containers” or just “containers” because “dockers” are pants.
3rd world idiot here. Docker pants like in clothes, was in a mall when I read your comment earlier and I spent a fair bit of time thinking up a response to your comment, but the joke’s on me. Just installed requestrr in a minute from the gui in unraid. For some of us, this is awesome. I used to run a Fedora 14 samba server for many years, slowly working my way up to 17 or 18 until my initial partition (bad) choices made me look for something else. Can’t remember how long it is now, but my same Unraid server has been running for ever. Drives growing, motherboard changing, ram & cpu upgrading along the way. Yes, it costs 70 dollars or something up front, but in time and energy saved for me, it has been an amazing ride.
Containers are such a game changer for how I manage my apps and their dependencies. Love how I can try things out in a container, nuke it and start over, knowing I have a clean environment. I hate installing anything on my native host OS install these days if I can help it.
Yep. Crazy how quick they install and reboot. In the case of the RR apps with the way they communicate over a shared file system is powerful.
Built one with Proxmox with OMV on top.
I used a raspberry pi with OpenMediaVault
Never setup a nas but if I was to get one, I would use truenas since it is foss.
For fireproof and waterproof nas systems, check out iosafe. Not sure if truenas will work on them however.
TrueNas is just the software isn’t it? Which hardware to go with?
Yes, it is the OS of the nas. I do not know what hardware will work for it. I only played around with truenas in a VM
Plenty of FOSS ways to set up a NAS. I’m going for Debian with ZFS myself, I prefer custom solutions as they are almost always more flexible than “NAS OS:es”.
What software do you need when using debian? Just ZFS as a file system?
It depends on what your goals are of course, but I use ZFS for the file system, sanoid to take snapshots on a schedule (hourly saved for a few days, daily saved for 1-2 weeks and so on up to monthly saved a year or two), Samba to actually share the files to Windows computers, Plex to share media to my TV.
Also rsync to a second (offsite) computer for replication/backups of the most important stuff. That computer also takes ZFS snapshots to get easy versioning of the files.I wouldn’t recommend it for most people, but it’s nice if you’re comfortable working with Linux to begin with.
Is there good FOSS software that you can run on debian or ubuntu that can allow you to access your files using SFTP while the files are being stored with a RAID system? And is it possible to have your files store older versions of the file when you overwrite them and keep these older versions of the file for X months?
Yes, that shouldn’t be an issue. I believe SFTP would be supported basically out-of-the-box if you install OpenSSH during the install, but you might want to create a group and configure access if you’re not the only user.
The version thing is what I’m doing with ZFS (also works with BtrFS, but it doesn’t feel as reliable yet). Basically I take snapshots every hour, and the entire state of the filesystem at that point becomes frozen in time, and can be accessed as long as the snapshots exists.
sanoid automates the process and cleans up so that there’s a reasonable amount of snapshots, not hundreds or thousands.
Of course, this means that you can’t really regain any space when you delete things, until the oldest snapshot containing the data is deleted.
