First time building a home NAS

[nsas02]

Guys,

I've planning to build a home NAS for storing files and store movies so that I can watch them on my TV (99% of the time videos would be played on 1 device only). I'm not looking at transcoding at the NAS end (is this even correct?) but my TV/video player can take care of that.
I've had Raspberry Pi in my mind for this for a long time, but I couldn't find one in stock anywhere in Indian websites. Even if it is available, they're priced exorbitantly.
My guess is that even a 2nd or 3rd gen Intel processors can also serve this purpose, albeit with a higher power consumption is my understanding.
Any help on procuring a decent hardware for this is appreciated.

 

[navinbhatia]

How do you plan to store the data? Are you going to connect an external USB drive to Raspberry Pi/PC?

 

[nsas02]

How do you plan to store the data? Are you going to connect an external USB drive to Raspberry Pi/PC?

I have couple of SSDs (120 GB and 240 GB) lying from my old build. I'm planning to use them. If Raspberry, will use Sata-->USB converter. I'm not planning to store TBs of data at the moment. Will kickstart with the setup and may sell these SSDs and add a bigger capacity storage later.

 

[navinbhatia]

A Raspberry Pi will be alright for your need. Ensure the adapter you have supports UASP, providing better read/write performance. Please don't use model older than RPi 4 as Ethernet and USB bus is shared in them.

I presume your TV has a USB port. Why don't you connect one of your drives to the TV itself if the main purpose is watching movies on TV?

 

[nsas02]

A Raspberry Pi will be alright for your need. Ensure the adapter you have supports UASP, providing better read/write performance. Please don't use model older than RPi 4 as Ethernet and USB bus is shared in them.

I presume your TV has a USB port. Why don't you connect one of your drives to the TV itself if the main purpose is watching movies on TV?

Yup. Planning for RPI4 only.
When I watch it is easy. When parents want to watch, it is tough for them to copy to hard disc and then watch.

 

[ze_cook]

TV codec support could be sketchy, and in that case transcoding on the fly will be required. Something a bit more powerful like the a Pentium NUC will go a long way. They are more expensive of course.

 

[imran_chennai]

Having trodden a similar path over a couple of months, my 2 cents

• As for the hardware - use what you currently have (spare laptop/desktop) to deploy your NAS. If you are able to find an SBC for a good price down the line, you migrate. You can do some tweaking to reduce the power draw at idle & load via HW/CLI/Bash
• As for the software - After rounds of vigours "testing" over the last few months, I have found openmediavault (OS) & docker (apps) to be easy to deploy and maintain

I'm assuming that you have a smart android tv that can direct play x264/x265 content, if that is the case then Plex might work perfectly as your media streaming application. As for the media download and cataloging - *arr apps + a torrent client can take care of these. All of these can be deployed as docker containers across most hardware choices.

As a proof of concept, I'm sharing the services I currently run on a 4GB Rpi4. All the content is direct played without transcoding on the home network as well as others using VPN.
Do reach out to me if you need any clarification, happy to help .

 

[nsas02]

As for the hardware - use what you currently have (spare laptop/desktop) to deploy your NAS

I do have an old laptop with 3rd Gen i3. It doesn't have gigabyte lan port. So I'm not sure if there will be lags playing huge video files.

I'm assuming that you have a smart android tv that can direct play x264/x265 content

Yup. I've tried playing various formats via USB and it does.

As a proof of concept, I'm sharing the services I currently run on a 4GB Rpi4

Great. I've always wanted to do this project using Rpi. Unfortunately Pi is not available anywhere or available at an exorbitant price.

Do reach out to me if you need any clarification, happy to help .

Definitely. Will bug you once I start this project.

 

[bornlibra23]

Use this. I know its old but its solid. It will be come a set top box for your tv & you can host your media either directly on it or on on a separate nas, laptop etc.
Even plex has an official competitor but I forget what that is.

GitHub - RasPlex/RasPlex: Rasplex is a community driven port of Plex Home Theater for the Raspberry Pi

Rasplex is a community driven port of Plex Home Theater for the Raspberry Pi - RasPlex/RasPlex

github.com

I have a RPi3B+, XU4 & Odroid C2. I use the latter two to host & run plex.

You can use LIbreELEC too but I dont have any personal experience with it.

 

[nsas02]

Use this. I know its old but its solid. It will be come a set top box for your tv & you can host your media either directly on it or on on a separate nas, laptop etc.
Even plex has an official competitor but I forget what that is.

GitHub - RasPlex/RasPlex: Rasplex is a community driven port of Plex Home Theater for the Raspberry Pi

Rasplex is a community driven port of Plex Home Theater for the Raspberry Pi - RasPlex/RasPlex

github.com

I have a RPi3B+, XU4 & Odroid C2. I use the latter two to host & run plex.

You can use LIbreELEC too but I dont have any personal experience with it.

Sure. Will take a look at this as well. Thanks.

 

[bornlibra23]

What hardware are you looking at? Any restrictions? I can help there too.

 

[nsas02]

What hardware are you looking at? Any restrictions? I can help there too.

I'm not looking for transcoding on my hardware. So, a less powerful, less power hungry one with Gigabyte port is preferred. I was looking at Rpi4, but couldn't find it anywhere at reasonable cost.

 

[bornlibra23]

Having trodden a similar path over a couple of months, my 2 cents

• As for the hardware - use what you currently have (spare laptop/desktop) to deploy your NAS. If you are able to find an SBC for a good price down the line, you migrate. You can do some tweaking to reduce the power draw at idle & load via HW/CLI/Bash
• As for the software - After rounds of vigours "testing" over the last few months, I have found openmediavault (OS) & docker (apps) to be easy to deploy and maintain

I'm assuming that you have a smart android tv that can direct play x264/x265 content, if that is the case then Plex might work perfectly as your media streaming application. As for the media download and cataloging - *arr apps + a torrent client can take care of these. All of these can be deployed as docker containers across most hardware choices.

As a proof of concept, I'm sharing the services I currently run on a 4GB Rpi4. All the content is direct played without transcoding on the home network as well as others using VPN.
Do reach out to me if you need any clarification, happy to help .

View attachment 138680

Of which software is this UI?

I'm not looking for transcoding on my hardware. So, a less powerful, less power hungry one with Gigabyte port is preferred. I was looking at Rpi4, but couldn't find it anywhere at reasonable cost.

Well I also thought that I wont need transcoding but later realised that most of the media not comes encoded with H265; and that was 5 years ago. If you have a TV which can decode H265 then its great but otherwise you will fall short.
Either way I would steer you towards picking a software first, seeing the SBCs it supports & then hunting for an SBC. This way you can effectively increase your pool of SBCs & hopefully net one. Hoping only for a Raspberry PI is not a good idea.
I am suggesting a software which gives you a experience like Android TV etc. Something like LibreELEC, Plex, OSMC, Emby etc.

 

[imran_chennai]

I do have an old laptop with 3rd Gen i3. It doesn't have gigabyte lan port. So I'm not sure if there will be lags playing huge video files.

It should not be an issue. I had no issues playing 2FHD + 1 4K concurrent direct streams with the 100Mps ethernet port when I was using the Pi 3B. The computation burden scales when you start to transcode (video/audio). Since most of the devices released in the last 3-4 years have HEVC codecs, the decoding can be done by the client (Phone, TV, Laptop), the NAS in this setup just needs to stream the bits and metadata without any network interruption. There is not a lot of processing overhead in a direct-play streaming setup.

Also, I'm fairly optimistic that it is a "gigabit (1000Mps) ethernet port" on your laptop if you look close enough.

Of which software is this UI?

This is just a static bookmark page generated using homer
https://hub.docker.com/r/b4bz/homer

 

[nsas02]

I saw this for sale in TE. I know this is an OVERKILL, but still haven't heard back from the owner. What do you think?
Ryzen 3 2200G CPU
Asus Prime B450M-A motherboard
Zotac GTX 1050Ti OC Edition GPU
Crucial RAM 2400MHz 16GB (4GB x4)
Crucial P1 512GB NVMe SSD
Thermaltake TR2 S 500W PSU
TP-Link AC1200 Wireless WiFi PCIe Card
Cooler Master Force 500 case

 

[bornlibra23]

Too much for your use case. You will consume too much power.

 

[nsas02]

Too much for your use case. You will consume too much power.

ya, exactly as I thought. Thanks.

 

[ze_cook]

I saw this for sale in TE. I know this is an OVERKILL, but still haven't heard back from the owner. What do you think?
Ryzen 3 2200G CPU
Asus Prime B450M-A motherboard
Zotac GTX 1050Ti OC Edition GPU
Crucial RAM 2400MHz 16GB (4GB x4)
Crucial P1 512GB NVMe SSD
Thermaltake TR2 S 500W PSU
TP-Link AC1200 Wireless WiFi PCIe Card
Cooler Master Force 500 case

Lose the 1050ti and this will be a nice deal. 2200g has vcn so h.265 hardware accelerated decoding will work fine. Your idle power consumption should be somewhere around mid 30 watts, certainly not as efficient as ARM based SBCs.

 

[nsas02]

Lose the 1050ti and this will be a nice deal. 2200g has vcn so h.265 hardware accelerated decoding will work fine. Your idle power consumption should be somewhere around mid 30 watts, certainly not as efficient as ARM based SBCs.

That was the plan as 2200g is an APU. Let's see if this is even available still.
Most of the websites do not have Rpi on stock and the ones that have are only 8Gb variants, and they're ready to sell it only as a kit, which comes around 16-17k. So I thought of this PC.
On the other hand, how big is 30W consumption? Any realtime device example? Like, fan/ light or something like that?

 

[imran_chennai]

It is like leaving ~2 led tubelights on or running a fan in speed 4 (1-5). More than the power consumption, I would be brothered about the heat generated if you live in a geographically hot place.

I do have an old laptop with 3rd Gen i3. It doesn't have gigabyte lan port. So I'm not sure if there will be lags playing huge video files.

Try deploying using the existing hardware. Laptops generally come with ULV processors, which translates to lower power draw and heat. You can limit cpu frequencies to keep it humming at 10-15 W and still have enough compute headroom.