Reddit mentions of Synology 4 bay NAS DiskStation DS418 (Diskless)

Higher end

Lower end

Both support what you're looking for, and management is very starter friendly.

I personally chose the NAS route instead of multiple easystore units. You can grow as you need to and yes using 2x 4TB drives with 2x 8TB drives will absolutely work. It depends on how much you want pay up front. If you’re not looking to build it yourself you can buy a Synology DS418 and connect your current easystore units through USB until you can buy more drives. Eventually you can shuck them and add it to your pool of storage.

It’s a little more than $300 dollars but it’s a great option to set it and forget it. And you can run Plex from the NAS itself.

Synology DS418 NAS Disk station, 4-Bay, 2GB DDR4 (Diskless) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075N17DM6/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_O9JeAbRVAJG3D

A NAS by definition is network-attached. Take a look at this unit from Synology. We have a few of these in our NOC. It has 4 drive bays, supports many flavors of RAID for redundancy, and only costs around $400. You'll need to buy the drives themselves separately, but they're relatively cheap. If you use RAID 6 and 2TB drives, you'll get 4TB of storage with enough redundancy to cover 2 concurrent drive failures. You could also use RAID 5 with 2TB drives which will give you 6TB of storage and allow for one drive failure.

id probalby look at something like this https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS418-Diskless/dp/B075N17DM6/ref=pd_sbs_147_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B075N17DM6&pd_rd_r=V838D2919EHSSNB2H18H&pd_rd_w=Iu0wi&pd_rd_wg=yIIEW&psc=1&refRID=V838D2919EHSSNB2H18H

You connect them to your switch with etherned. If you want wireless, just connect to your wifi router, which will connect to your nas.

There normally pretty quiet.

And they have apps to make most of your wants easy.

Well im not familiar with that model, from the specs it show using 1.4 GHz Realtek RTD1296 Quad-Core, which would be worst.

From amazon reviews of the Synology 4 bay NAS DiskStation DS418 (Diskless)

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>the DS418 uses a Realtek ARM CPU which won’t run Plex

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>Bad News: If you are a fan of Plex you may be out of luck. Synology seems to have discontinued support for Plex for all model NAS servers aside from those using an intel processor. According to the Plex forums, some of the older DS418 models do have the intel chips but almost all of the new ones have the Realtek quad cores in them.

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>My only complaint, which is my fault, is that the device is not strong enough to support Plex Media Server on its own.

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>I docked it a star for not being able to transcode plex

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But crosscheck on synology forums and on plex forums.

I have a Synology ds 418 and a hikvision camera. You can record with the synology software for free (no cloud) for 2 cameras i think

Some of the backplanes are flaky in the QNAP models (like the TS-563), but I’ve not heard of any issues with Synology devices. I run servers for storage, Dell or SuperMicro, so I’m out of the NAS game a bit.

Maybe start here and see what you think: Synology 4 bay NAS DiskStation DS418 (Diskless) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075N17DM6/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_smpwCbQB42EJD

I have a desktop set up as my Plex server now, but I'm looking into a Synology NAS to increase storage capacity. If my PC streams everything fine at the moment is there any reason to get the Synology Play over the regular version?

You could look at something like a 4-bay Qnap or Synology:

https://www.amazon.com/QNAP-TS-451-Personal-Quad-Core-Transcoding/dp/B015VNLGF8/ref=sr_1_31?ie=UTF8&qid=1551036590&sr=8-31&keywords=synology

https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS418-Diskless/dp/B075N17DM6/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1551036686&sr=8-4&keywords=synology

I have a synology (not this one in particular) and I love it but as far as I am aware Qnap makes damn fine products as well.

what made you buy a prebuilt over building your own?

i mean this looks like the model you got which is $350 without even getting into drives.

https://www.serverbuilds.net/145-nas-killer-v20/

passmark score of almost 10k, 24gb of ram, 15 hard drive bays, a way to upgrade beyond even that and you get to run your own os/programs.

Hoping I'm not too late to the thread for this week! If not I'll repost on Friday.

I want to make a standalone Plex server, which I might end up using for some other pet projects but for the purposes of this thread assume it's just a Plex server. My server peaks at 5 simultaneous streams, currently running on my main desktop PC. I want something very small to handle this, and with unlimited potential to expand storage.

Here is what I'm thinking.

1. An Asrock Deskmini with a 7700K in it, and an NVME drive. Here's the part list for it. Is 16GB sufficient, or should I pay the extra to go up to 32GB?
   
   
2. Low power Synology NAS for storage. Just 4 bays for now (I have 4 drives to put in it!), but it's cheap enough that I can buy another a couple years down the line and have double.
   
   I wouldn't mind paying a bit less for everything, but I specced out a $1000 mini-ITX machine, and this basically costs the same, but in a much nicer form factor.
   
   Thanks in advance!

If you are looking to keep it standalone from your PC, you are looking for a NAS solution. Honestly with that many drives its not very power effective and if you really want to utilize them, you should stick them in your PC. Otherwise, you need a external NAS enclosure such as the one below to use them, and they are not cheap.

https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS418-Diskless/dp/B075N17DM6/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=5+disk+nas&qid=1565629034&s=gateway&sr=8-3