Discussion
Sure I've seen a few folk here say they use this. Thinking about ditching my Synology DS214 Play in favour of a home-built NAS running FreeNAS. Primary motivation is Plex, it can't transcode very well on the Synology because for various reasons it can't use the hardware transcoding support.
I have an i7-3770 and some RAM (consumer stuff, no ECC etc.) left over from my previous PC after the motherboard died so was thinking of getting hold of a NAS case and a Mini-ITX motherboard and putting those bits back to work. The i7 CPU would transcode just fine when I used to run Plex on the PC it powered so in theory it should work OK for this.
I did a little digging online and found some posts on FreeNAS forums and elsewhere which suggested that folks using commodity hardware (i.e. not server-grade) are basically wasting their time. Is that the case or is that just fanboi snobbery? Any further advice regarding hardware selection I should know?
I have an i7-3770 and some RAM (consumer stuff, no ECC etc.) left over from my previous PC after the motherboard died so was thinking of getting hold of a NAS case and a Mini-ITX motherboard and putting those bits back to work. The i7 CPU would transcode just fine when I used to run Plex on the PC it powered so in theory it should work OK for this.
I did a little digging online and found some posts on FreeNAS forums and elsewhere which suggested that folks using commodity hardware (i.e. not server-grade) are basically wasting their time. Is that the case or is that just fanboi snobbery? Any further advice regarding hardware selection I should know?
I would say that FreeNAS has become VERY greedy on hardware, especially if you use the ZFS filesystem. It's not really aimed itself at small users since about 2009-2010.
It's also likely to be a bit of a shock to the system when compared to the ease of use of the Synology (eg, the android apps, the video\audio\photo station web portals, etc). All of these things *can* be done open-source, but it's usually a lot more work.
I'd suggest looking at a more upmarket Synology device, and that's coming from someone who used FreeNAS for about a decade. The ease of use and feature set is worth the money.
OpenMediaVault, Nas4Free and Openfiler are all other open source alternatives that may be worth a look.
It's also likely to be a bit of a shock to the system when compared to the ease of use of the Synology (eg, the android apps, the video\audio\photo station web portals, etc). All of these things *can* be done open-source, but it's usually a lot more work.
I'd suggest looking at a more upmarket Synology device, and that's coming from someone who used FreeNAS for about a decade. The ease of use and feature set is worth the money.
OpenMediaVault, Nas4Free and Openfiler are all other open source alternatives that may be worth a look.
Could you use XPEnology- the open source version os Synology?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUQEeA4RPyc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUQEeA4RPyc
Thanks both. I should maybe have said in my OP, I'm an experienced Solaris, AIX and Linux system admin by day so the technicalities of FreeNAS don't scare me in simple terms, I guess what does concern me is stuff like decent hardware support as I said above and also time and effort - I've got two young kids so free time is at a bit of a premium.
Higher-end Synology would be nice but I worry about how much I'd have to spend to get one that did have a CPU powerful enough to be able to transcode whatever I could throw at it.
XPenology might be an option I guess, although it's not quite an open-source version of DSM is it, it's a repackaging of it to run on commodity hardware? Might that not mean limited support for non-Synology hardware?
OpenMediaVault is another option, I could be wrong but I'm expecting that because it's based on Linux it might have wider hardware support - that may not be a safe assumption though.
ETA - final option might be to leave the data on the Synology and use the hardware I was going to built a NAS out of to build a simple Plex server and just point it at the NFS share for the media...
Higher-end Synology would be nice but I worry about how much I'd have to spend to get one that did have a CPU powerful enough to be able to transcode whatever I could throw at it.
XPenology might be an option I guess, although it's not quite an open-source version of DSM is it, it's a repackaging of it to run on commodity hardware? Might that not mean limited support for non-Synology hardware?
OpenMediaVault is another option, I could be wrong but I'm expecting that because it's based on Linux it might have wider hardware support - that may not be a safe assumption though.
ETA - final option might be to leave the data on the Synology and use the hardware I was going to built a NAS out of to build a simple Plex server and just point it at the NFS share for the media...
My Microserver N54L was quite happy running Plex with FreeNAS on 4x2GB drives, it did creak when trying to transcode HD but it's only a little Athlon. I'd guess an i7 will breeze it.
ECC is recommended, but not mandatory. There's lots if you google about it. This is apparently one of the ZFS devs:
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&...
Try to give it lots of memory though - 1GB of memory per GB of disk or 5GB per GB if you enable dedup(!)
ZFS and FreeNAS has been great. Gone through one hard drive swap and one boot USB swap without issue, upgraded minor versions smoothly.
ECC is recommended, but not mandatory. There's lots if you google about it. This is apparently one of the ZFS devs:
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&...
Try to give it lots of memory though - 1GB of memory per GB of disk or 5GB per GB if you enable dedup(!)
ZFS and FreeNAS has been great. Gone through one hard drive swap and one boot USB swap without issue, upgraded minor versions smoothly.
8bit said:
ETA - final option might be to leave the data on the Synology and use the hardware I was going to built a NAS out of to build a simple Plex server and just point it at the NFS share for the media...
This is exactly what I do for my Plex setup. I have two Synologys (DS211 + RS815+) for media storage and then I run Plex/Sonarr/Couchpotato/SABnzbd on a Shuttle PC that I built a few years ago. It handles it all no problem (i5 processor + 4GB Ram). I then use a Roku 3 as the player.
essayer said:
My Microserver N54L was quite happy running Plex with FreeNAS on 4x2GB drives, it did creak when trying to transcode HD but it's only a little Athlon. I'd guess an i7 will breeze it.
ECC is recommended, but not mandatory. There's lots if you google about it. This is apparently one of the ZFS devs:
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&...
Try to give it lots of memory though - 1GB of memory per GB of disk or 5GB per GB if you enable dedup(!)
ZFS and FreeNAS has been great. Gone through one hard drive swap and one boot USB swap without issue, upgraded minor versions smoothly.
Having trouble with your T key?ECC is recommended, but not mandatory. There's lots if you google about it. This is apparently one of the ZFS devs:
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&...
Try to give it lots of memory though - 1GB of memory per GB of disk or 5GB per GB if you enable dedup(!)
ZFS and FreeNAS has been great. Gone through one hard drive swap and one boot USB swap without issue, upgraded minor versions smoothly.
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