Joining the Synology camp with my 2017 storage refresh.

[Lazybones]

- 3x Seagate IronWolf 8TB (newegg.ca had a shell shocker on these recently)
- Synology DS916+ (8GB)

Currently waiting for the initial raid parity to build but I am kind of excited about the upgrade. While I have been purging old content things where starting to get tight on my old setup.

Moving from about 8TB useable space to 14TB usable space with at least one more bay free to grow or the option to do in place swapping.

While I run several VMs at home I am not sure what I am going to do about compute yet. I first plan on moving my data over and retiring the Virtual NAS I have been using. A big part of this upgrade is simplification. A large number of the VMs I run however could be run directly on the NAS as both Docker and Full VM support (beta) are possible.. The onboard CPU isn't all that powerful however so my Ark server and my one windows desktop VM leave me looking for options.

I am considering a NUC for compute as it is very small and generally works with VMware so that might make the storage and compute separation very easy.

As for plex I have to wait and see... The Hardware Accelerated Trans-coding preview seems like it would allow me to run Plex  on the NAS (there are forum posts on its performance on the same CPU) with little issue, but it is still in preview only, not yet a plex pass release.

[Mr. Analog]

Welcome to the family!

One of the things I am impressed with is how easy maintenance and the actual speed achieved at various functions. I really have no regrets

[Lazybones]

Welcome to the family!

One of the things I am impressed with is how easy maintenance and the actual speed achieved at various functions. I really have no regrets

This was a hard one for me since I have been building my own for so long.. I JUST WANT IT TO WORK! So I am willing to spend more money on less power.

Really Really wanted hot swapping drives/bays which is still somewhat costly to do on a build your own system. I also wanted easy in place expansion without re-inventing the whole storage array again.

I was looking at units with way more bays before but with the 8TB drives going on sale for $319CAD I hit a fairly good cost per TB vs smaller drives.. I had originally planned on migrating my existing 3TB drives over but now I don't really need to as I generally achieved my doubling of capacity with 3 drives.

[Mr. Analog]

Oddly enough I'm in the same boat, I have leftover drives from my other setups, thinking about turning my old machine into a server now, at least it will have lots of storage space

[Thorin]

I've always just bought WD Blacks for everything.  I pay more at the outset for the peace of mind that the drives should last longer because they warranty them for so long.  Generally I've outgrown the drive size (i.e. they're just too small for real use) before they've failed.  I have old 250GB and 500GB and 1TB WD Blacks sitting around the house.  And when a drive or two did die due to a bad power supply frying it, I got free replacements.

So, those Seagate Ironwolf drives...  3 year warranty, that's not bad, better than most drives you can buy these days.  But less than the WD Blacks and correspondingly cheaper, too.  Are you worried about them failing at all?  I can't seem to find too many real reviews about their longevity.

That said, $320 for an 8GB drive is pretty damn good!

[Melbosa]

I've tried to run Plex on the Synology DS1218 I own with expanded 2GB of ram, but found that it only really worked as a Direct Play Plex server. Plex is heavy CPU if it has to transcode anything including subtitles and I found the Synology couldn't produce when that happened.  Now granted mine is quite a few years old now so the architecture behind the scenes has been updated considerable with new generations since mine was bought.

I also use my Synology for data and VM iSCSI LUNs, but I still use HyperV for my VM execution with that dual 2U server I bought last year.  Again I don't think the hardware in my Synology will do VMs very well, and I have that server anyway.  Besides I like having SATA SSDs in my servers for my servers.

As for Drives I am a combination of WD Black and Seagate Iron Wolfs.  I know I should really keep to one disk manufacturer, but when there is a $50 price difference when I got to replace one, well that lower cost drive wins .

[Lazybones]

I've tried to run Plex on the Synology DS1218 I own with expanded 2GB of ram, but found that it only really worked as a Direct Play Plex server. Plex is heavy CPU if it has to transcode anything including subtitles and I found the Synology couldn't produce when that happened. 

It isn't practical on the CPU without acceleration (unless it is an i3 or higher) which is why you need specific models for this to work out (Synology CPUs).

The DS1812+ uses an Intel Atom D2700   Dual Core   4 thread CPU which is    in the Cedarview Generation.

The DS916+ uses an Intel Pentium N3710   Quad Core    4 thread CPU which is in the Braswell    Generation.

Unfortunately Cederview CPUs do not support Intel Quicksync, however Braswell has fairly good support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video#Hardware_decoding_and_encoding

[Melbosa]

I've tried to run Plex on the Synology DS1218 I own with expanded 2GB of ram, but found that it only really worked as a Direct Play Plex server. Plex is heavy CPU if it has to transcode anything including subtitles and I found the Synology couldn't produce when that happened. 

It isn't practical on the CPU without acceleration (unless it is an i3 or higher) which is why you need specific models for this to work out (Synology CPUs).

The DS1812+ uses an Intel Atom D2700   Dual Core   4 thread CPU which is    in the Cedarview Generation.

The DS916+ uses an Intel Pentium N3710   Quad Core    4 thread CPU which is in the Braswell    Generation.

Unfortunately Cederview CPUs do not support Intel Quicksync, however Braswell has fairly good support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video#Hardware_decoding_and_encoding

Yeah sorry for the typo DS1812+ is correct.  As for the CPU list, that link you sent didn't exist when I bought mine, and Plex support on the Synology was almost brand new at the time of my purchase.

Like I said I was sure your architecture was newer and better than mine, was just sharing my experience.

[Lazybones]

I've tried to run Plex on the Synology DS1218 I own with expanded 2GB of ram, but found that it only really worked as a Direct Play Plex server. Plex is heavy CPU if it has to transcode anything including subtitles and I found the Synology couldn't produce when that happened. 

It isn't practical on the CPU without acceleration (unless it is an i3 or higher) which is why you need specific models for this to work out (Synology CPUs).

The DS1812+ uses an Intel Atom D2700   Dual Core   4 thread CPU which is    in the Cedarview Generation.

The DS916+ uses an Intel Pentium N3710   Quad Core    4 thread CPU which is in the Braswell    Generation.

Unfortunately Cederview CPUs do not support Intel Quicksync, however Braswell has fairly good support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video#Hardware_decoding_and_encoding

Yeah sorry for the typo DS1812+ is correct.  As for the CPU list, that link you sent didn't exist when I bought mine, and Plex support on the Synology was almost brand new at the time of my purchase.

Like I said I was sure your architecture was newer and better than mine, was just sharing my experience.

O I know.. That is why I also shared the links.. the Number of units that will potentially work with the hardware accelerated version is still very narrow and mostly recent as of the 2016/2017 models.

RS3617xs+
RS3617RPxs
DS3617xs
DS916+
DS716+II
DS716+
DS416play
DS216+II
DS216+


I stumbled on the SD416play (which explicitly advertises trans-coding and was mentioned in the plex forums) then dug deeper to find other models and that list. Main reason for jumping to the DS916 was a lot more ram and quad core vs two core. I hope to run a few of the smaller utility things directly on the nas.

Now fingers cross that the plex team actually releases a stable version with trans-coding.

I use offline sync to my phone and my kids iPads a lot.. Most of the time on my i5 I get about 20x speed trans-coding which is still a long time for a movie.. Some forum users are reporting that the quicksync accelerated encoding hits over 100x speed when doing trans-codes.

The nas users report 720p transcodes going from 4 cores at 100% down to 1 core at 25% for load..

It will be a BIG enhancement for plex.

[Thorin]

Wait, Plex doesn't already take advantage of QuickSync?  So, at some point it might become four or five times quicker to transcode?

[Lazybones]

Wait, Plex doesn't already take advantage of QuickSync?  So, at some point it might become four or five times quicker to transcode?

Nope, this has been a long standing request.. Part of the delay is the stability and quality of the trans-code in FFMPEG / Plex.

Currently the beta turns out inconsistent image quality and doesn't fall back on software encoding if hardware fails.

[Lazybones]

FYI I have the Experiential release running on my NAS now, it looks like with hardware acceleration I am able to easily do 1-2 transcodes at the same time at under 30% CPU.. That includes transcoding two 1080p h264 videos to 720p at once with DTS down sampling done in CPU.

Quality / macro blocking however is a problem but I think they had that working better in past releases.

I also tested a bunch of random old files on the server with various codex, DIVX, XVID, MPEG1 and MPEG2 all of them software decoded and then hardware encoded to h264 with very reasonable CPU use.

Just need to be VERY sure not to put HEVC / h265 10bit content on my server, hehe.