Network Area Storage/External Drives for Movie/TV collection.

[Knave]

I have two 8TB external drives, they're slowly starting to fill out and I'm down to ~1TB of space. I've ripped a significant portion of my physical Movie & TV collection. I also have a large iTunes collection of ~3 TB that I back up by putting on each of the 8TB drives.

It's nice to have access to hundreds of shows and movies in a small portable device I can hook up to my computer and laptop.

Would moving up to a planned Network be my next step? Should I pick up another (maybe higher capacity) external drive instead?

I'm looking at network storage because it consolidates. 2 drives already feels like a bit much. There are only so many USB connections to use when keyboard and mouse are USB, phone cable is USB, headphones is USB. It can also be a bit of a pain to plug and unplug as needed because my desktop computer is up against a wall and desk.

Reason I'm looking into it now is we have Black Friday/Cyber Monday coming up in November and then Boxing Day in December. It's an opportunity to get stuff on sale.

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[SniperHF]

Some routers can accept external storage attached via USB so that might be another option to somewhat consolidate your current externals.

I have a Buffalo NAS, it's quite handy. Don't have much experience with other brands. Interface is kinda pokey but once set up it runs pretty well. Timers for shutdown/startup based on time and day so it's not sitting there banging away all the time.

Actually come to think of it, the Buffalo NAS will also accept an external USB storage to further help consolidate.

Outright replacing 2x8TB drives + more space via a NAS will not be inexpensive. So I think keeping the current USBs and adding a NAS on top of it is probably the better way to go.

I'd think you'd probably need a 4 disk NAS minimum, even if you only use 2 to start. Also need to think about if you want RAID or not.

 

[Knave]

Some routers can accept external storage attached via USB so that might be another option to somewhat consolidate your current externals.

I have a Buffalo NAS, it's quite handy. Don't have much experience with other brands. Interface is kinda pokey but once set up it runs pretty well. Timers for shutdown/startup based on time and day so it's not sitting there banging away all the time.

Actually come to think of it, the Buffalo NAS will also accept an external USB storage to further help consolidate.

Outright replacing 2x8TB drives + more space via a NAS will not be inexpensive. So I think keeping the current USBs and adding a NAS on top of it is probably the better way to go.

I'd think you'd probably need a 4 disk NAS minimum, even if you only use 2 to start. Also need to think about if you want RAID or not.

Yeah it will be expensive for sure. I'll keep the external drives even if I go with network storage. The drives will provide portability with the laptop when I'm not at home. I was thinking ideally I could put everything into the new network storage drives and then cycle stuff on and off one of the portable drives while using the second to backup stuff (the iTunes downloads, some physical media where I can't seem to find the discs for aynmore).

Would you recommend getting a bay with nothing in it and then buying the hard drives?

 

[Osprey]

Why don't you buy a NAS device that's empty (or with a cheap, low capacity drive) and then put your current 8TB drives into it to see how you like it? If you do like it, you could expand the capacity by adding another drive (assuming that you got a NAS with room for 3 or more drives).

BTW, there are also USB-attached devices that can take up to 5 drives, like this. That could be an option if it can connect to your router or a computer that you always have on.

Also, I can't imagine lugging heavy, 3.5" drives, plus their enclosures and power supplies, around with me while away from home. I greatly prefer 2.5" portable versions like this, since they're small and USB powered. They don't give you quite as much space per drive, but they're so much more portable. I'd much rather travel with two of them than one 3.5" drive.

 

[Knave]

Why don't you buy a NAS device that's empty (or with a cheap, low capacity drive) and then put your current 8TB drives into it to see how you like it? If you do like it, you could expand the capacity by adding another drive (assuming that you got a NAS with room for 3 or more drives).

Also, I can't imagine lugging heavy, 3.5" drives, plus their enclosures and power supplies, around with me while away from home. I greatly prefer 2.5" portable versions like this, since they're small and USB powered. They don't give you quite as much space per drive, but they're so much more portable. I'd much rather travel with two of them than one 3.5" drive.

I guess yeah. I've never really used the smaller portable version hard drives. I don't have a reason why.

Would setting up the network storage not try to wipe the 8TB external drives after I've extracted them from their casing? Or is it as simple as inserting them and all the stuff on there will be accessible?

What I'm trying to achieve: something to watch the movies/tv shows off of from various computers/devices. So reliable and can play a movie while transferring a file or something. Would doing 2 8TBs then 2 drives of a different size be a bad idea? The online answers I'm seeing say it's doable but it would be preferable to do uniform hard drive size.

 

[SniperHF]

Would setting up the network storage not try to wipe the 8TB external drives after I've extracted them from their casing? Or is it as simple as inserting them and all the stuff on there will be accessible?

On my NAS they would require formatting. Mine only allows XFS drives internally. I think this is true of most lower/mid level devices.
This Synology is the same:
Products | Synology Inc.

See "internal drives"

I assume it will vary model to model. Probably would require a higher end model to use an NTFS drive internally. Most of the ones I've encountered use an embedded Linux or BSD so they likely will all use XFS/EXT/JFS or something along those lines.

There are NAS you can get that are basically small Windows servers, but if you're gonna do that I'd just build a small box myself.

 

[Knave]

Alright well last night I bookmarked a few NAS 4 bay systems.

One from Buffalo, one from Synology and one from QNAP. I also bookmarked some 8-10tb drives with NAS in their description. Now I'll wait to see if anything goes on sale.

 

[Zodiac]

i picked up a Western Digital MyCloud Mirror NAS a few years ago to store my movie collection. it has two 2tb hdds that i run in RAID 1 mirror mode. it has various apps that you can install on it, with PLEX being one of them ...which is great for the movie collection.

it streams the movies without any problems, but one thing that caught me off guard in the beginning was that the movies had to be in .mp4 format to stream. at the time, i was used to converting DVDs into xvid/divx ...but it wouldn't stream that format because the NAS wasn't powerful enough to transcode and stream those formats on the fly. at the time, i discovered that most of the NAS setups weren't able to do that ...with the exception of a few really expensive ones.

so after converting all my movies to .mp4, streaming works perfect with PLEX. just something to keep in mind ...be aware of the format of your movies ...mp4 should be fine ...the other formats, be aware.

 

[Knave]

i picked up a Western Digital MyCloud Mirror NAS a few years ago to store my movie collection. it has two 2tb hdds that i run in RAID 1 mirror mode. it has various apps that you can install on it, with PLEX being one of them ...which is great for the movie collection.

it streams the movies without any problems, but one thing that caught me off guard in the beginning was that the movies had to be in .mp4 format to stream. at the time, i was used to converting DVDs into xvid/divx ...but it wouldn't stream that format because the NAS wasn't powerful enough to transcode and stream those formats on the fly. at the time, i discovered that most of the NAS setups weren't able to do that ...with the exception of a few really expensive ones.

so after converting all my movies to .mp4, streaming works perfect with PLEX. just something to keep in mind ...be aware of the format of your movies ...mp4 should be fine ...the other formats, be aware.

Yeah I'm kind of hoping for something a little more free where I can stream ISOs (for the Bluray/DVD menus) and MKVs.

I'm slowly reading up on them and think Synology DS418play NAS Disk Station, 4-bay, 2GB DDR3L might be the one I'll go with. From the reviews it's not powerful but good enough for 1 user playing 1080p

So I'll wait a few months, check out the Amazon, Newegg and other places to see if it goes on sale before 2019.

 

[mouser]

I've done a lot of research on different NAS solutions. My current 4-bay HP NAS has been getting long in the tooth, so at some point I'll be replacing it.

Have pretty much locked down on buying one of the Synology 4-bay models. The OS and apps they have available are very appealing. In general you don't need too much CPU horsepower on the NAS systems unless you're transcoding video, or running some other CPU intensive app on the NAS.

Synology upgrades most of their model lines every 1-2 years, so there may be a window to get a discount on an older model if you follow their release cycle.

 

[IslesNbeer]

I was doing it with USB enclosures for a while, then a nas and quickly out grew that. Now I've built a 60TB server and use drivebender to pool the drives. I built a pretty beefy server as it runs 3 vms as well as network storage. If you are only using it as network storage you dont need a overly powerful PC and gives you more flexibility in the future if you decide you want it do more

 

[Knave]

I was doing it with USB enclosures for a while, then a nas and quickly out grew that. Now I've built a 60TB server and use drivebender to pool the drives. I built a pretty beefy server as it runs 3 vms as well as network storage. If you are only using it as network storage you dont need a overly powerful PC and gives you more flexibility in the future if you decide you want it do more

Nice, I'm not really there yet. I'll probably be moving homes in a few years after I finish up some professional qualifications building a server sounds like a long term plan for me so something compact, smaller and cheaper like the prebuilt brand NASes seem best to me. I'll also need the next ~12 months to pay off my student loans completely.

Maybe a few years down the road where I'm more settled and in a slightly higher paying job I'll try to build a crazy set up including a full server.

Ultimately right now I'm just looking for a bit more space (my collection shouldn't expand too much further from where it is now). I'd like to be able to play stuff off it like mounting an ISO directly from the NAS instead of transferring an ISO on to the computer and then playing it.

And @mouser I checked out the release schedule, looks like they announced new Synology models in the summer for some time in 2019 (hopefully early?). I guess I'll check for any big sales on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day in particular and if nothing big is announced I'll continue to wait for the new models. I'm going back and forth between the DS418play and the more expensive but newer DS918+.

 

[mouser]

I've done a lot of research on different NAS solutions. My current 4-bay HP NAS has been getting long in the tooth, so at some point I'll be replacing it.

Have pretty much locked down on buying one of the Synology 4-bay models. The OS and apps they have available are very appealing. In general you don't need too much CPU horsepower on the NAS systems unless you're transcoding video, or running some other CPU intensive app on the NAS.

Synology upgrades most of their model lines every 1-2 years, so there may be a window to get a discount on an older model if you follow their release cycle.

Bumping an old thread, my HP NAS finally gave up and died this week. Or at least it's gone over the top finicky, probably a power supply issue, but it's just not worth the investment to troubleshoot. I know I can recover all my data off it, so planning to just move onto a new NAS. Still pretty focused on the Synology products, looks like they have an even newer low end 4 bay solution.

Considering:
DS420J (or DS418J) $300
DS418 $370
DS418Play $425
DS918+ $550

Key product differences for my use appear to be:
Memory: 1 GB on 420J, 2GB on 418 & 418play, 4GB on 918. Note: 418play is upgradable to 6GB, 918 to 8GB
Swap: 420j cannot hot swap drives, the 418, 418play and 918 can
CPU: quad RTD1296 on 420J and 418, dual Celeron J3355 on 418play, quad Celeron J3455 on 918
Cache: 918 includes two M.2 drive slots for SSD cache
Expandability: 918 supports a 5 bay expansion unit to 9 drives total. Expansion unit ~$500

Pretty certain I'm going to eliminate the 420J simply on the memory. My biggest worry would be that Synology's OS drifts towards expanding footprints and it's eventually the RAM that limits the practical NAS lifetime. Plex is a strong consideration, though I'm not certain if I'll run it. Supposedly Plex is now supported on the Realtek RTD CPU's though I don't know if there are any caveats on that which make the Celeron CPU more preferable.

Leaning strongly towards the DS418Play, I think the memory expandability is worth the $55 price jump over the DS418. Haven't seen a performance comparison between the RTD1296 and Celeron J3355, but I'm suspecting my performance profile will be more dominated by single thread performance then core counts, making the DS418Play Celeron a better choice then the DS418 Realtek chip. I'm not seeing $125 in additional value with the DS918--don't expect I'll be doing stuff that needs the extra CPU boost and no expectations of going past 4 drives.

 

[Supermassive]

Damn, you guys are hardcore! I've been doing Plex for about five years, working up to my current situation of a 6TB drive and a 4TB drive. I almost bought a 14TB drive while in the States, but chickened out. My internet isn't fibre, my wifi isn't terribly fast, my library is still less than 3000 movies, and my tvs aren't really useful for 4K.

I have found that x265 encoding is really helpful in saving space while giving enough quality on a 1080p set, and using very little bandwidth on the router while others are hogging the wifi. Picture quality is good enough, I'm more of a content over quality fan. Doesn't streaming compress the data anyways?

I also don't backup my iTunes and Google Play collections to local storage. Is that necessary?

NAS seems like a pretty cool way to go, if you're willing to put in the time and money. I'm not quite convinced yet, though.

 

[aleshemsky83]

Anyone else find that h265/hvec buffers and loads kind of harshly on Plex? I know it's infamously hardware intensive but I've got a ryzen 3600 and it's still the same experience. I've heard that Intel handles hvec much better than ryzen so maybe that's the issue.

Regardless, seems like it's smarter to stick to h264 from now on

 

[Osprey]

I have found that x265 encoding is really helpful in saving space while giving enough quality on a 1080p set, and using very little bandwidth on the router while others are hogging the wifi.

x265/H.265/HEVC is great. I've found that it produces file sizes roughly 60% that of x264/AVC at the same image quality. Using 10-bit (instead of regular 8-bit) supposedly also helps a tiny bit with file size and banding reduction at the small cost of longer encoding time.

Anyone else find that h265/hvec buffers and loads kind of harshly on Plex? I know it's infamously hardware intensive but I've got a ryzen 3600 and it's still the same experience. I've heard that Intel handles hvec much better than ryzen so maybe that's the issue.

I'm not using Plex, but my desktop with an old FX-6300 (about half the speed of the Ryzen 3600) and no x265 acceleration in the GPU plays x265 movies just fine in 1080p. It does have trouble with 2160p/4K, but ,if you're just sticking to 1080p and reasonable bit rates (ex. your movies aren't 20GB each or something), they should be playing smoothly. Maybe installing a codec pack would help.

 

[aleshemsky83]

I'm not using Plex, but my desktop with an old FX-6300 (about half the speed of the Ryzen 3600) and no x265 acceleration in the GPU plays x265 movies just fine in 1080p. It does have trouble with 2160p/4K, but if you're just sticking to 1080p and reasonable bit rates (ex. your movies aren't 20GB each or something), they should be playing smoothly. Maybe installing a codec pack would help.

It plays video fine, but streaming to my tv and phone is another matter. That's where it's causing problems.

 

[Osprey]

It plays video fine, but streaming to my tv and phone is another matter. That's where it's causing problems.

If it plays fine locally and just isn't streaming smoothly, I would think that the problem isn't the CPU. Perhaps the issue is with your WiFi or your TV and phone. Come to think of it, over the holidays, I cast a number of x265 1080p movies from my two-year-old phone to a few TVs without any issues, so I would think that it can't be that hardware intensive for the source device.

 

[aleshemsky83]

If it plays fine locally and just isn't streaming smoothly, I would think that the problem isn't the CPU. Perhaps the issue is with your WiFi or your TV and phone. Come to think of it, over the holidays, I cast a number of x265 1080p movies from my two-year-old phone to a few TVs without any issues, so I would think that it can't be that hardware intensive for the source device.

I don't think so, the signal is pretty strong

Edit: it's playing much better now actually. Maybe they updated the player, I've mostly been a Netflix watcher in recent months. it used to freeze up on hvec videos when k skipped through shows. Though I did recently plug my tv into the modem so maybe it was the connection.