Thoughts on switching from RPi4 to a NAS server

[luanuchoa 0]

Hi all.

Every now and then I think about switching my Emby installation.
I did a little bit of research and, while having got some useful info here in the forums, I would like to have some considerations to my specific scenario.

Currently I use Emby Server on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB RAM and an external drive for storing media (USB Seagate 8 TB externally powered). This setup serves my home well enough.
Right now all my media is using ~3.8 TB, so the storage available will be ok for a few years.
However my setup runs 24/7 and I fear for my media integrity. And that's why I've been considering a NAS device with RAID 1 configured.

My struggle is that I'm on a budget and want to optimize for power consumption since where I live the electricity cost is quite steep.
So, I thought about either:

• getting a NAS device with two disk bays, two HDDs with 8 TB each, and then running Emby with a RAID 1, or
• getting two HDDs, pair them with an external-powered HDD dock with two slots, and configuring RAID 1 on software.

With that said, my questions are:

• Which approach would be best?
• In case of NAS, which device would serve me well? Transcoding is not a problem, and if is, I am happy to previously transcode the media before pushing it to server.
  I have some 4K HDR content which may pose a challenge but my main streaming device is a smart TV happy to do the heavy lifting for me.
• In case of software RAID, would the CPU penalty be too much? My RPi setup usually hangs around 1% when idle but from my past experiences it is definitely not capable to transcode anything. Have anyone here in the forum tried this?

Thanks in advance.

[TMCsw 249]

Option 3 get one more 8TB disk and connect it directly to the Pi (even if it’s on a usb 2.0 port) then set up a cron to run rcync to back-up the media after hours to the usb 2.0 port drive (keep the main disk on the 3.0) the first backup will likely take a few days (but who cares) in the future it won’t take long as files are added gradually.

[rbjtech 5284]

Do you have a backup strategy ?  How often do you update/add media ?

The best thing to do is just use a 2nd OFFLINE disk as a backup device - a) it's offline, so is costing you nothing to run and b) because it's offline - it's not susceptible to the likes of ransomware or accidental deletion.

The only downside, is you need to keep it updated - thus the question above, if you only add media infrequently (and would not really have an issue if you only 'lost' media since the last backup) then this is a perfect solution - and is what I do. 

For a home media solution, having any form of RAID is just complete overkill imo - an offline backup has big advantages over RAID as long as the update/loss frequency is acceptable.

Edited March 18, 2023 by rbjtech