Little bit of advice

Nape Dog

Evening all
I currently run Plex Media Server on my iMac (2010/3.06/i3), with all media saved on a 5TB external drive.

The family watch Plex via LG Smart TVs, Firesticks, iPads, phones etc and as the iMac is currently wired to a google wifi node (not hardwired to the network so to speak), everything streams over wifi.

To date, no issues except when I tried to play some larger 4k movies which would buffer every few seconds (not sure if this was due to iMac unable to handle it, or down to the being sent over wifi).

My current 5tb Media storage is pretty much full and not sure what to do to remedy this. I could just buy a new larger drive but I'd like to incorporate some kind of protection for my media files and also have the ability to expand in the future if possible.

so, I was thinking I could go with a 4 bay NAS, with 4tb drives using RAID 5 or 10 to give me 12tb usable space. This will be enough for a while, giving enough space for Media along with an extra backup of all the family data from the iMac (in addition to the time machine backup running in background).

My question is, if I go with a NAS and continue to run PMS on the iMac, can a simple lower end NAS do the job?

I was thinking the TerraMaster F4-210 at c£240 could do the job...

I'm not savvy enough to make something myself, so can anyone recommend something simple and low cost?

mickevh

I'm probably stating the obvious, but the higher the def. of you or media (or strictly speaking the higher the bit rate requirement,) the more capacity your network transport needs to have. If you are doing this all over Wi-Fi, it may be that it doesn't have the bandwidth. You might experiment a bit and see what happens if (for example) you stream lower def. media, turn off all the players and one by one test each one with your 4K and so on and try to build up a mental picture of what works and what doesn't. If at all possible, also test using wired ethernet and see if that makes any difference.

If your iMac/PMS front end is not "wired" to your network (the pathway between iMac and the Wi-Fi AP's is not wires all the way) you could be doubling down on network capacity as streamed traffic has to traverse the Wi-Fi airwaves twice.

If you buy a NAS, I think I'd be tempted to buy one that can run PMS natively and not bother having your iMac fronting it. That'll save you  a box and reduce the complexity a little (indeed, it could be the iMac that's struggling - esp.if it's real time trans-coding, though that's an issue for any box.) However, I'm not a NAS expert and other regulars here are and will doubtless chime in.

I wouldn't bother with RAID 1 0 for SOHO - it halves your available storage. RAID 5 (over 4 platters) is probably good enough (at penalty of 25% capacity,) though many argue that it's not worth bothering with any RAID for a media tank if you have the original media on disc and can (albeit with time penalty) re-rip it if a disc dies. It's something of a value judgement.

Worked example, using 4 X 4TB drives in "classic" RAID configurations (none of the fancy "hybrid" RAIDs and bastardisations of some OS's)...

With no RAID, (often called JBOD - just a bunch of discs) would give you 16TB available storage.
RAID 5 would give you 12TB of storage.
RAID 1 0 would give you 8TB of storage.

At risk of teaching granny to suck eggs, I guess we cannot state often enough through these columns - RAID is not "backup" - it's a way to avail continued access to data when a disc dies (they all die in the end) and some RAID versions don't even do that (e.g. 0,2,3.)

bubblegum57

Off topic, but I was thinking a replacing my nvidia shield as a plex server, with a Terramaster NAS. But I was thinking of buying a higher spec one.

you might find this spreadsheet useful, although it doesn't give specs for many terramaster.

I certainly, think the terramaster's are better value than Synology (DS 414 owner)

Plex NAS Compatibility

wormvortex

RAID is stupid for a home media enivorment. It's redundancy not a backup. Are you ever going to be in the situation where if a drive fails you cannot afford downtime?

If you have the physical copies of your media that is a backup. If not then you need a 1 for 1 backup stored in a different physical location to your primary drives if you want to do it properly.

Nape Dog

Thanks for the replies.
I will be running a cable this weekend so the iMac will be hard wired and not reliant on the wifi between the google wifi nodes. I think the iMac will be capable and this will resolve that side of things.
Assuming it does, will the Terramaster do the job I need? i.e. store the media for iMac/PMS to serve up?
That being said, if I go for a NAS which will run PMS, should I look at the Synology 418play as an option?

I will have other copies of all data (media and family documents) in other locations, so I won't be seeing this as the backup, it will just be the central location to view/access everything.

Can you explain why RAID for home media is not a good idea? and how i should configure drives? as individuals? JBOD?
I thought RAID (maybe 5) would be good so , if a drive does fail, everything keeps running until a new drive can be added. Appreciate some guidance

Sloppy Bob

Using traditional RAID also locks in your drive sizes.

If you buy 4x4TB drives and run out of space you can't expand your array without replacing all the drives and how do you get the old info off the drives to put on the new ones?
Also, you'll be losing 1/4 of your storage space to redundancy.*

First I'd advocate buying larger drives to start off with. If you look at the price per TB, 8TB is probably the most cost-effective just now. You don't need to populate all your drive bays straight away.

Secondly, especially if you're convinced you need to use RAID* I'd look at Synology.
Synology do their own RAID system called Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR). The large advantage to it is that you can mix drive sizes and expand the RAID array which you can't do with traditional RAID systems.
So for example you could start off with 2x6TB discs, when you run out of space you could slot a 10TB in (now it would only see it as an 6TB at this time) then later add another 10TB and you'd get the full use of the the 10's (but one of the 10's is now the redundant drive). Later again replace, one at a time both the 6's with more 10's. So you available drive space has gone from 4x6TB (18TB useable space, minus the overhead) to 4x10TB (30TB useable space, minus the overhead) and those 10's could again be swapped out for larger drives.
I know it sounds a bit complicated, here's a link to SHR from Synology's own website - RAID Calculator | Synology Inc.

Now I'll admit, * I use RAID on my mainly media NAS. I also have a backup as well. However, I have an 8-bay NAS so I'm only losing 1/8th of my total storage. I'm not sure if I'd bother with a 4-bay and lose 1/4.
8-bays seems a lot?
I worked out I was cheaper buying an 8-bay NAS and re-using drives I had in the house already than buying a 4-bay and buying 4x large drives for it. Using SHR I can mix drive sizes as long as I put the discs in the smallest first.

mickevh

The argument is: Using RAID you sacrifice storage capacity, in quite significant amounts, to mitigate a low impact risk.

In businesses we use RAID because we cannot afford to be without access to our data for any amount of time when a disc dies (certainly not the day or so it would take to replace and restore from a backup.) Whereas for a home media tank, it's less big a deal that you can't watch some movies/music for a while.

So those that want the most storage for their money prefer to not use RAID and get all the TB's they paid for as available storage, but accept that when a disc dies, they will loose all data therein and it'll take a while to re-rip all their media. (Of course, anything stored on such discs that isn't copies of original media - say downloaded stuff or camera photos, spreadsheet, documents, etc. - will need to be backed up somewhere as there is no "original media" you can recover from.)

Conversely, if you don't mind paying for the storage overhead of RAID, they by all means do so - it's a lot easier and less time consuming to replace a dud disc and let it do a RAID recovery than restore/re-rip with the advantage that you still have access to your data whilst RAID arrays are degraded and/or recovering.

In IT there are many matters we can be quite prescriptive over as they are (for example) standards based or there's "agreed wisdom" as to how to proceed, but for some things there's alternates available and a value judgement is required. This is one such case. So we'll endeavour illustrate the options and the reasons for each, (and there may be passionate advocates of the various alternatives,) but ultimately you'll need to decide for yourself.

Incidentally, if you opt for RAID 5 (which we use in business a lot as it's a good trade off of performance, resilience and capacity,) bear in mind that if the enclosure (ie the NAS chassis itself) fails, it's unlikely that you would be able to "simply" take the discs out and recover them in another box. Whereas with mirrored (RAID 1) discs there's a better chance and with plane vanilla (JBOD) discs, you almost certainly can. Just one more factor to weigh up.

Wiki's articles on RAID are quite good if you wand a primer "standard" RAID technologies - though bear in mind what Sloppy Bob says about how some mfgrs have their own "bespoke" RAID versions boasting additional features (such as easy expand-ability.)

And who thought storage could be so complicated! IT professionals are well used to the conversation with the FD that goes "what do you mean you need to spend 10K on more storage - I can get a 4TB disc for 2.99 in PC-World" and which point we have to roll our eye and explain that "it's a bit more complicated than that....."

Nape Dog

Thanks for all this. It’s been really helpful.

I’ve run a cable from Mac into the network and the 4K movie still buffers. The CPU runs at 100% so I can only assume that my Mac can’t handle.
So, I either get a new Mac or a higher grade NAS such as the 418play or 918 to run PMS.

Thanks a lot. I think I have all I need for now.

mickevh

Serving files is a very low CPU activity, practically anything can do it.

If your Mac is showing high CPU "just" serving files, it suggests that the PMS app on it is possibly trans-coding the media on the fly (converting it from one format to another) which can take as much CPU as you can give it (and/or suggests the device you are playing back on can't handle the 4K stream.)

It might be interesting to shut down PMS on the Mac, then drop some target media into a plane-jane SMB network share and see if your client can play back OK from that. If so, it would indicate that the client is OK with the data stream, that the network (and the Mac) can handle it and that something's "up" with PMS if it's insisting on transcoding. Maybe there's some tweak that you can do to PMS to tell it not to transcode.

Nape Dog

Thanks for that tip. I found that having subtitles on as default meant having to transcode everything.
Turning that off has stopped the transcoding and they play just fine now, even without being hardwired.
Thanks a lot