The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/Jj_cale on 2024-09-05 10:13:34.
Hey folks,
Just wanting to dip into the swarm wisdom here on which of the option is better:
My Current Setup & use case: 15 year old Qnap 4bay NAS 8tbx5 with raid5, plus a 5 year old thinkpad laptop, both hardwired into the router. My primary use cases are simply Plex, local and remote streaming, all the relevant arrs and backups for photos (I do photography). the space is running low at the moment plus i want to expand
Upgrade Option 1: Build a N100 based dedicated 8 bay NAS. move everything from windows to TrueNAS Scale. chuck in 4x20tb in addition to the 4x8tb i have, so should work for a while.
Upside being the new intel chipset graphic part can handle transcoding better, so the remote streaming is easier. Current set up choke on pretty much any transcoding on 4k level. I get to learn thing by moving to a docker/plug-in world from windows, and the setup seems to have upgrade flexibility. Downside being it is pretty expensive, these cases, if you want it to look half-decent only takes SFX power supplier, which is very expensive for some reason in Europe where I live.
Upgrade option 2: buy a beelink n100 mini PC, plug a 10gb USBC DAS with 8 bays in it and run software raid through TureNAS Scale. the tradeoffs compares to option 1 is really just its much easier to setup, cheaper but you give up upgradability because you have a miniPC and that's about it.
Would any of you folks have a view on how I should think about these two options in terms of pros and cons, is my approach logical and sensible?
PS. I am a bit confused about the the throughput on various components here. so we have 2.5g lan ports, PCIE 3 x4 and x1 slots of NVME in the option 1 for both cache for TrueNAS and another one for sata expander which i would need to attach 8 drives, all drives will be spinning disks with parity 1 setup (pls tell me if this is silly and parity 2 is a much), and then you have the 10gb USB 3 gen 2 on the DAS. Is the bottle neck here the spinning disks read and write? Speed is not that important just want to understand, since I only need it to do PLEX and that at most is still less than gigabit lan.
Much appreciated in advance for any thoughts and inputs from you folks.