4-Bay NAS for Plex

[awraynor]

I'm currently running an OG Core i7 with 8GB of RAM on WHS 2011. With this software dying and becoming unreliable I'm looking at going to a NAS box. This box uses a lot of electricity and makes a lot of heat.

It needs to be a dumb box, sitting in the corner with probably 4-4TB drives. I'll likely use VEEAM for backup unless built in software is superior?

It needs to also do duty as a Plex Media Server with probably one stream being sufficient at any one time.

My friends on HomeServershow.com are steering me towards QNAP as you seem to get a little more hardware for your money and we know transcoding on Plex loves some CPU cycles. I store everything in mp4 and will most of the time stream to my Amazon FireTV in the living room or an ATV2 in the kids playroom.

I'm thinking the TS-451+, TS-453 Pro or maybe even TS-563 may be good options. Being able to upgrade the RAM would be a good thing and it doesn't have to be pretty as it will likely just sit in a corner somewhere.

After looking around I wonder if a NAS is the best option if Plex won't run on a sub-$1000 box. If so I would consider just building a low power Win10 box full of drives.

Any thoughts?

 

[coxhaus]

I think you will miss your horsepower with transcoding. What about going with a newer home server software? Since you already own a server it has to be a lot cheaper just to use what you have. You can probably find a lower wattage CPU if you want to lower your power draw.

 

[awraynor]

I am beginning to lean that way. I like the complete package of a prebuilt NAS, but think it is too wimpy for what I need.

I stumbled upon this build for cheap and I may simply use Win10 on it with DrivePool from CoveCube. Make it a backup
target with VEEAM, Plex, CrashPlan, etc. $229 for an HP box with 4GB of RAM and a Xeon processor.

http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/10342-unboxing-my-ml10v2-yippee/

DrivePool is awesome. I was using BuiltIn storage spaces, but when a drive was going bad I couldn't separate
it out from the rest.

http://stablebit.com/DrivePool