I want to upgrade my Synology NAS which currently have seven 6TB drives running on SHR2. I’m slowly creeping towards the max capacity and have been thinking about what to do.
I have about 10 more of these drives just laying around so I was thinking of just building another NAS with them but that will be complicate things with Plex. I also have a ton of industrial grade 2TB SSDs but I don’t have a use for them, are there any NAS solutions for them?
Would making a seperate NAS with the spare drives but only putting movies/shows on it for plex be a good solution? My current one has a lot of personal videos/pictures that I don’t use with Plex. My main concern is just the complications with having new NAS. If one day I decide to consolidate them all, would that be a problem? I’m currently running Synology hardware but what if I want to move it out of the ecosystem?
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Buy cheap used PC components, toss those 10 6TB drives into a large case, use your OS of choice, add the SSDs as a cache array, and you’re good to go.
My main concern is just the complications with having new NAS.
Can you actually articulate these complications? Is ‘consolidation’ the singular issue that’s giving you pause? Because that’s not an issue at all.
I’m currently running Synology hardware but what if I want to move it out of the ecosystem?
Why would moving out of their ecosystem be an issue?
A low-end motherboards usually have only 4 native SATA ports, the ones with more are costly. You will need a extra pci-e sata raid card (4 a 6 ports, usually), but they are dirt cheap.
If you are use mostly as a Plex box, a Linux with Docker/Portaineir is good enough. But you can explore some ‘storage oriented’ distros, like Unraid (non-free, but isn’t costly), who also can run a dockerized Plex without problems.
I am very partial about of use of MergerFS storage, the ‘poor man raid’, as I said. Without redundancy or disaster recovery, but easy and cheaper to build.