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+--- Thread: Help deciding how to properly use NAS (/t-help-deciding-how-to-properly-use-nas)
Help deciding how to properly use NAS - nocturnalnerd - 2025-02-12
I've been reading non-stop online and I'm overwhelmed, please help me get my thoughts straight.
I want:
- To run Jellyfin to watch content on my phone, Hisense TV with Android TV on my bedroom and the LG webOS on the living room.
I have: a spare gaming PC in the living room for home office with Nvidia 3060Ti and Ryzen 5600X. 16GB RAM
So, I've been reading and DIYing your own server can lead to many issues like: UNRAID problems with transcoding, TrueNAS problem with transcoding.
This worries me since I'm not a native English speaker and I also watch mostly anime, so subtitles are a must. If subtitles are involved, transcoding happens, 9/10 times (I just tested it on my gaming PC and LG TV).
Many copies of Japanese movies have weird audio format as well.
So, what do you recommend for me if I already have a capable (although power hungry) PC ready to go (I game on a separate PC, this one is for home office).
Options:
1. DIY a NAS and doubling it as a server?
2. DIY a NAS and having my PC to be the server
3. Buying a pre-built NAS like Synology, and try it to be the server and see if it can handle the load?
4. Buying a pre-built NAS, mapping the network drive and use my PC as the server.
If 4, can I have like the same Jellyfin server on my NAS and PC, to have like my NAS always on but if I want to watch a very demanding movie I can just switch to my PC Jellyfin and have it all the same?
RE: Help deciding how to properly use NAS - TheDreadPirate - 2025-02-12
Right off the bat, I strongly discourage getting a Synology, or similar, NAS to run Jellyfin. Pretty much none of them have a CPUs/iGPUs capable of handling more than a couple 1080P streams. And just barely. And they are not really upgrade-able so they are very limiting in the long term.
If you want a Synology NAS to simply be your storage, that is another story. Go for it.
Personally, my server is also my NAS. It is a custom built PC with parts picked for the intended usage of running Jellyfin and other services. If you have the know-how, this is the route I would suggest.
BUT, if your spare PC is literally doing little to nothing right now, the specs you've stated are perfectly capable of running Jellyfin easily. Put in a bunch of hard drives, configure the OS to make them available over the network, and now it is also a NAS.
RE: Help deciding how to properly use NAS - nocturnalnerd - 2025-02-12
(Yesterday, 04:30 PM)TheDreadPirate Wrote: BUT, if your spare PC is literally doing little to nothing right now, the specs you've stated are perfectly capable of running Jellyfin easily. Put in a bunch of hard drives, configure the OS to make them available over the network, and now it is also a NAS.
My fear is that if I just add a bunch of drives to my gaming PC, those drives can fail and I will lose all the media. And If I use some kind of Raid, and my Motherboard fails, I'm screwed.
That's why I wanted a NAS. I know a NAS is not a backup, but with some kind of RAID I got less of a chance of losing media. In the end I will only have movies and shows there, so if I lose some, it's not the end of the world.
RE: Help deciding how to properly use NAS - TheDreadPirate - 2025-02-12
In the case of a motherboard failure, if you used a ZFS RAID array and moved the drives to a new system you can easily import the existing ZFS RAID. Much less problematic and much simpler than classic RAID5's.
This is what a lot of people do, including me. I store my media on a RAIDZ-1 ZFS array. The ZFS functional equivalent to a classic RAID5. You can also go do a RAIDZ-2, equivalent to a RAID6.
A Synology NAS doesn't do anything special. They just slap a UI on top of, usually, ZFS. And they don't do anything with ZFS that you can't do on plain Linux. Same with TrueNAS. At least with a custom built system you can replace JUST the failed part. A failed Synology NAS would require replacing the entire unit.
RE: Help deciding how to properly use NAS - Efficient_Good_5784 - 2025-02-13
To start, RAID is not a backup. It exists to protect against downtime.
If you're really worried about losing data, you need to have a backup of your data on an actual 2nd machine and/or location.
As @TheDreadPirate states, the Synology NAS doesn't do anything special that you can't imitate without it.
I just want to point out that a NAS at its core is just plain storage located anywhere on a network.
That's what the name implies.
NAS = "Network Attached Storage"
There exists DAS which stands for "Direct Access Storage". If you want to get into technicalities, anything directly plugged into the current PC you're using counts as a DAS.
The reason people confuse a NAS as being specially made for data storage (when it comes to data protection) is because it usually goes hand-in-hand with that concept.
NAS boxes get sold with the expectation that people will fill them with lots of data.
The companies that make these NAS devices usually provide their own OS that has relevant software pre-installed.
Things like SMART tests, data scrubs, and RAID software are examples of what they shove into their OS.
These things are not exclusive to them. You can use these things yourself provided your OS supports them.
Synology uses the BTRFS filesystem, while other NAS OS's like Truenas can use ZFS.
ZFS and BTRFS are special in that they are a COW filesystem which enables things like snapshots.
You can use snapshots to roll back to a previous instance of how your files were set. Kind of like if you took a picture of them (hence the name, a "snapshot").
COW also provides other benefits which are amazing for long-term data storage.
However, when it comes to something like Jellyfin, it's better to use a non-COW filesystem as COW lowers the performance of Jellyfin's config files.
Truenas, as an example, forces you to only use ZFS. Synology does allow you to use EXT4, but you give up the COW features.
Ideally, you would want to use ZFS/BTRFS for data storage, and something else like EXT4 for your app data storage.
RE: Help deciding how to properly use NAS - nocturnalnerd - 2025-02-13
(Yesterday, 09:39 PM)TheDreadPirate Wrote: A Synology NAS doesn't do anything special. They just slap a UI on top of, usually, ZFS. And they don't do anything with ZFS that you can't do on plain Linux. Same with TrueNAS. At least with a custom built system you can replace JUST the failed part. A failed Synology NAS would require replacing the entire unit.
Thank you. But I need to still use and have my gaming machine turned on with Windows for work, I know there is some Linux add-on now for Windows, would there be possible to have Linux running Jellyfin or any other kind of VM while I'm still on Windows and that's what controls my HDDs with the media?
The issue with this is if the VM system can directly access my GPU to do the transcoding. Because I will need the transcoding for all the media that I need with subtitles.
RE: Help deciding how to properly use NAS - TheDreadPirate - 2025-02-13
You can just run Jellyfin directly on Windows for now. Down the road you can decide you want to build a purpose built machine, or build/purchase a NAS (to be just a NAS), with some sort of redundant storage array.