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?
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...
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