Emby lover but a NAS noob

[sekondchakra 6]

This kind of feels like a general question to start, which is why I'm posting it in here--let me know if I should continue the conversation in a different forum...

I have a 5 or 6 computers/devices I'm currently using (Win 10 PC, 2 iMacs (1 old, 1 new coming soon to replace it), an Arch Linux box (where Emby server currently lives, and where I have a NZBGet + Sonarr setup), a Raspberry Pi-4 (running Pi-Hole), and a laptop (Dual-boot Win10/Manjaro).  

I just occurred to me how nice it would be to be able to access all of my data (mostly on the WIN10 & iMac) from any and all of my devices.  Duh!  

Being a total NAS newcomer, it sounds like that's the way to go--and I just learned that Emby server will run on at least a 2-bay Synology!  Because I don't know what I don't know yet--I guess I'm checking with you guys to see if--since it feels like there's a NAS in my future anyway--it would be 'better' or 'smarter' to move my Emby server to a new NAS--since it will be always-on anyway (unlike the current media server box that I typically only turn on at night to do my Sonarr-NZBGet-Emby-Roku thing). 

Based on only an hour or so of poking around, the first two devices that have crossed my radar are the Synology 2 Bay NAS DiskStation DS220+ (Diskless) or QNAP TS-251D-2G 2 Bay Home NAS with Intel Celeron J4005 CPU and One 1GbE Port   

I guess what I'm asking is whether it's possible/desirable/worthwhile/advantages/disadvanges to move my Emby+Sonarr+NZBGET setup to a NAS?

 

 

[CassTG 113]

Question i would ask is what spec is the emby linux box i.e cpu and ram, i used to be a synology fan and DSM software was great but when i last checked it, but the big downside i see with these consumer level nas is that they are severly underpowered for the money they cost.

I havent used a syno box in a while and have had a mix of a full proxmox box running on a pc i rarely used to a pi 4 nas. Pound for pound you could build a more powerful nas using proxmox and VM's if your linux box is already specced enough. But if its low power consumption and footprint then they are ok devices. I think i had the 218 which allowed more ram if you followed the unofficial guides, the 718 at the time was good but again expensive for the cpu power they offer.

Personally i have also looked at the Lenovo M900 boxes which you can get for a great price and come with an intel 15 6500 or higher for a similar price, small compact power efficient and great if you wanted to run a few VM's, for example you could fire up a vm for dockers (pop emby there) and then have another VM running Xpenology (hacked version of Synology DSM 6.2 (bit old now so security wise need to be careful)) or Truenas (if you have at least 16gb ram) or even openmediavault to handle Nas duties.

Edited December 9, 2021 by CassTG

[CassTG 113]

duplicate

Edited December 9, 2021 by CassTG

[sekondchakra 6]

30 minutes ago, CassTG said:

Question i would ask is what spec is the emby linux box i.e cpu and ram...

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2400G with Radeon Vega Graphics @ 8x 3.6GHz
GPU: AMD/ATI Raven Ridge [Radeon Vega Series / Radeon Vega Mobile Series]
RAM: 3140MiB / 13991MiB

 

[CassTG 113]

50 minutes ago, sekondchakra said:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2400G with Radeon Vega Graphics @ 8x 3.6GHz
GPU: AMD/ATI Raven Ridge [Radeon Vega Series / Radeon Vega Mobile Series]
RAM: 3140MiB / 13991MiB

 

Cool well i ran unraid on that exact setup, so depends if you like playing around, however not sure if igpu vega can be passed through to the vm's so that may be an issue if you transcode, my personal choice isn't unraid to be fair its great don't get me wrong but i never liked the way docker containers were setup on it as i prefer doing everything command line.

But thats more processing grunt than you would get on a nas by leagues. So If ya like to play around, and have a spare drive to practise with first i would throw proxmox on it and setup a couple of Debian 11 Vm's, one purely for docker stack, emby, *arr, photoprism, swag, bitwarden etc etc, and then throw up a nas vm (pick your flavour), allow NFS acceess from the docker vm to the nas vm and win win all round.

A lot more power a lot more fun and proxmox is pretty easy to grasp, or even try Unraid as its free to try and that puts it all on one box

Or if you really like to tinker and forgo the VMs you could install dietpi which i think is a great OS as it has a guided setup and an easy to use software manager via command line, so it can setup emby server amongst other things automatically and you can still install docker if you so wish for the other stacks. install Samba server add a share then it acts as your nas as well.z

If you dont like then sure get a nas, but you would need a serious unit to get anywhere near the power of that box

Edited December 9, 2021 by CassTG

[sekondchakra 6]

2 minutes ago, CassTG said:

If you dont like then sure get a nas, but you would need a serious unit to get anywhere near the power of that box

My linux mediaserver was my first attempt to set something like that up, and I always try and 'future-proof' new hardware, so I probably went way overboard.  Because I'm brand-new to the World of NAS, I think all I would need out of a first-time device would be something that would maybe run docker containers (portainer, sonarr, nzbget, emby).  Maybe see (just for fun) if it would run all of that with a pi-hole install...  A 2-bay Synology would probably be fine--I can't imagine ever needing more than a couple of maybe 2TB drives in it??   At this point it's mostly the excitement of learning something (with not too steep a learning curve) that will have the added bonus of having an always-on device that can handle a bunch of stuff I run every day anyway.  

I'm not that concerned about price at this exact moment (December is RMD time from the IRA), so which Synology 2-bay (or 4- I guess, if someone thought it wise) has the best specs for running emby, etc?

[CassTG 113]

16 minutes ago, sekondchakra said:

My linux mediaserver was my first attempt to set something like that up, and I always try and 'future-proof' new hardware, so I probably went way overboard.  Because I'm brand-new to the World of NAS, I think all I would need out of a first-time device would be something that would maybe run docker containers (portainer, sonarr, nzbget, emby).  Maybe see (just for fun) if it would run all of that with a pi-hole install...  A 2-bay Synology would probably be fine--I can't imagine ever needing more than a couple of maybe 2TB drives in it??   At this point it's mostly the excitement of learning something (with not too steep a learning curve) that will have the added bonus of having an always-on device that can handle a bunch of stuff I run every day anyway.  

I'm not that concerned about price at this exact moment (December is RMD time from the IRA), so which Synology 2-bay (or 4- I guess, if someone thought it wise) has the best specs for running emby, etc?

Okay i understand the learning bit as playing around with linux / dockers is endless fun.

So first off the Nas Route

Definetly Synology in my view as DSM always wins the awards, ill be honest the docker manager in 6.2 was bloody awful lol but thats just my opinion coming from the command line which i prefer, but everyones different.

I never ran Emby docker  (native app possibly) on the Synology so not sure how that rolls, but if it's very little transcoding then it should be fine. Hell i even ran Jellyfin on a Pi4 so again should be fine without transcoding.

The ds220 you mentioned would be the minimum pick as the J series are lower powered the Pluses have a bit more oomph. You also get Synology connect for easy external connection to the Nas, and the Cloud sync is great for having automated backup to say Gdrive or Onedrive.  I know some of the Play models were touted as media devices but they never seemed to gain pop. If money aint an issue then have a look at the 720, that has quad core and if it's the same as the 718 easily upgrade the ram

DSM is also great for first time Nas owners thats why i even installed the xpenology on my proxmox machine as it has the best interface for getting stuff done

As for 2 vs 4, depends on how much you plan to store, basically considering how big drives go its less of an issue now as you can whack in like 20tb plus the 720 can add on the expansion unit for more drives if needed

And lastly the one benefit of the 720 over the 220 is iot has nvme cache support, now i dont know if you can assign say emby to the nvme as emby seriously loves ssd performance for it's operation

It should in all fairness run all that and pihole / adguard home not sure how emby performs but im sure if you look in the nas forums here you will be able to guage that from the threads

Edited December 9, 2021 by CassTG

[sekondchakra 6]

I was juuuuust eyeballin' the DS720+ ...    But, hmmm...which drives--and what size?  I guess a first-step would be to go thru each device and see how much of everything I have...

Any recommended brands of drives, etc?

[edit]  Can NAS drives be partitioned, etc...?

Edited December 9, 2021 by sekondchakra

[CassTG 113]

Just now, sekondchakra said:

I was juuuuust eyeballin' the DS720+ ...    But, hmmm...which drives--and what size?  I guess a first-step would be to go thru each device and see how much of everything I have...

Any recommended brands of drives, etc?

First off i added some more info to my last post

Refernce Drives i know Synology have brought out there own range which guarantee compatibility.

I have used both WD Reds and Seagate Ironwolfs which are both Nas Drives. I had less failures with Ironwolfs but someone else would say the opposite. And if you buy OEM drives which you most likely will ignore the 5 year Guarantees they all advertise these do not apply to oem drives.

As for size again thats down to you.

Reference the 720 it states a max of 6GB ram but i swear i went higher in my 218 lol

[sekondchakra 6]

Do I need to be concerned about compatibility with any of my existing devices?   My router??  (An Asus RT-AC1900)...?  I've had experiences in the past where I've bought one new toy--and suddenly I have to upgrade a bunch of other stuff...  

Edited December 9, 2021 by sekondchakra

[Luke 42085]

16 minutes ago, sekondchakra said:

Do I need to be concerned about compatibility with any of my existing devices?   My router??  (An Asus RT-AC1900)...?  I've had experiences in the past where I've bought one new toy--and suddenly I have to upgrade a bunch of other stuff...  

I think it will be fine with your router.

[CassTG 113]

17 hours ago, sekondchakra said:

Do I need to be concerned about compatibility with any of my existing devices?   My router??  (An Asus RT-AC1900)...?  I've had experiences in the past where I've bought one new toy--and suddenly I have to upgrade a bunch of other stuff...  

Na you should be fine, i would not use the Synology auto network setup however as it whacks a load of upnp entries into the router, the synology connect works fine as does its inbuilt ddns updater, and it's firewall is pretty easy to setup, so you can do port forward on the router for port 443 quite easily and restirct access at the dsm level if you want extra layer of protection, not sure if it's the same on dsm7 but one thing is if using a proxy docker like swag, you also have to add the (sub)domain names and forwarding Docker IP of the swag /proxy  docker, simple enough to do takes a few secs but took a while to work out why i couldnt connect to the dockers

Edited December 10, 2021 by CassTG

[Carlo 4561]

Personally with the current Ryzen computer you have I would not go the Synology route. For 1/3 to 1/2 the money you could buy a nice Nvidia GPU to drop in that box.  Now you can run VMs, docker and Emby quite easily on the same box and have somewhere between 10 to 20 active transcodes going on.

Since you are likely used to Arch Linux I bet you will quickly feel constrained with Synology as it's based on Linux but isn't.  What you may feel comfortable doing from Terminal or SSH will likely not work on Synology.  If you can't find an app in the Synology store you have to resort to using docker as you won't be able to download and use deb, rpm or other typical Linux packages. If you want to run VMs on the Synology you will need to upgrade the memory and buy licenses for more than one VM.

Synology and similar NAS boxes are great for certain things but a poor choice for other things.  To me it's not a good solution for a media server unless you only need a couple streams and get a NAS that has QuickSync.

Download and install Xpenology in a VM which will give you a DSM 6 like experience.  This will let you play with the apps they provide as well as let you get a feel for what other apps you can bring to it (or can't). If you like it and find it will work for you then consider building your own NAS with a GPU and CPU of choice and installing that on it which is an option that will give you a much more powerful NAS with an easy to use GUI.  But I suspect you'll probably still prefer Linux over it for the pure control it gives you. The apps they have for backup and other business uses Drive Server, Office, CloudSync, Surveillance Station, Synology Photos are really nice so you may even want to keep Xpenology available via VM for the apps it's excels at.