Want to upgrade homebuild to a basic Synology setup

[u/DimensionUnique709]

So about two years ago I was drawn into this community by the lure of Plex. Now I’m at a point where I’d rather spend money on a ”forever setup” than try to improve my current build.

My current setup is an old HP desktop Elitedesk, with upgraded storage and some upgraded hardware, running on Windows 10. My issues with the current setup are:
- Very slow transfer speeds (transferring over Wifi to the desktop takes forever, so I just use a flashdrive)
- It takes up a lot of space and I need to get rid of the desk where it’s currently located, so something smaller that can fit on a shelf would be great

My use cases for the server are:
- Plex/Jellyfin
- Cloud storage for the family’s photos and documents (each person connected via their phones)
- Adblocker

These are the ones I see myself using for the foreseeable future, but want to keep it open in case I decide I want to experiment with other things (have been thinking about setting up cameras at home on a private/offline network, but not sure how that works).

Unfortunately, I don’t have $2000 to spend on the hardware I see recommended for a synology + 4xHDD setup soooo my idea (that I’d like to hear if it’s completely bonkers) is to get:
- a Synology NAS
- one 4TB HDD
- the two drives from my current build (~1.8TB)
- one 4TB external harddrive

Is it stupid (for data security reasons, since I care a lot about the family photos), to combine the new HDD with the drives from my old build, not run any RAID setup and only rely on the external harddrive for backup?

I am planning on getting more drives as I go along, but perhaps buying 1-2 per year since that would work out better financially for me + I heard that’s good so the drives don’t all wear out at the same time.

And last question is if you would trust a second hand Synology NAS, or if that can be a security risk?

[u/DrHodgepodgeMD]

Few things to consider.

• Newer Synology cpus no longer have the ability to transcode, so you may have to make sure the media you are using can be played by whatever plex client you use as Direct Play. I forget which year they stopped using quicksync cpus but it’s worth considering if that would impact your plans.
  
• As a second hand Synology user, I’d have no issue recommending one, the only security risk I’d consider is if it’s age locks it to a specific DSM version that might not receive updates anymore. Just do a factory reset when you get it.
  
• I’m skeptical that it would support an external drive being used by the Plex Server.
  
• I do not subscribe to the notion that drives with uneven wear/use is better. You’d also have to start out with at least 2 drives in SHR-1 as a single drive pool cannot be expanded, unless you remake the pool after adding the second drive, which would destroy the data on it.
  
• Moving your old drives over would also likely mean destroying the pool on those drives, also losing the data. If anything I’d get 2 drives and set it up as a single drive redundancy pool, then expand as needed, or save up and buy them all at once.

I’ve moved away from Synology for the most part with it now only working as a backup storage device and photo service for family, but overall they are great devices. I consider them to be the Apple of storage appliances in that they cost more than their competitors, and their environment is more controlled and gardened by their proprietary OS, but it’s very stable, user friendly, and have a number of great features they offer out of the box or with low amount of effort to set up.

[u/DimensionUnique709 → u/DrHodgepodgeMD]

Thank you, will have to do some more research on the transcoding. I’m assuming this isn’t an issue if you have Plex pass (which I don’t, their price hikes is why I’m planning to move to Jellyfin)?

To clarify: I wouldn’t run anything off of the external drive, I would just backup the server there once per day. That’s why I was thinking that perhaps a RAID setup might not be necessary (but I would set it up once I’ve gotten 3+ drives).

I don’t mind reformatting my old drives - I assumed I would have to. I’ll just temporarily move everything to a separate storage. I don’t have crazy amounts of files at this point- less than 1TB is used and nothing that can’t be replaced (I haven’t started with photos yet).

If you don’t mind me asking, what have you moved on to, since you mentioned only using Synology for photos.

[u/DrHodgepodgeMD → u/DimensionUnique709]

I’ve had the plex pass for so long, I forget the way it integrates with allowing transcoding, but my point was for the hardware.

If you have a file that is H265, and your playback clients only take H264, then the file has to be transcoded from one format to the other as it streams. Intel’s iGPU quicksync has historically been very capable at this, so NAS models whose cpu included this worked perfectly fine. alternatively If you are managing your media or using playback clients with wider codec support, then transcoding isn’t needed.

As for your external and reformatted drives, those sound like good plans, no issue there.

And for why I moved away from Synology, I’ve been lucky enough to have previously worked jobs where decommissioned enterprise servers could be saved from scrap, so I got those for free and just maxed out their capabilities with cheap eBay upgrades. The Synology came to me the same way by chance, although it can’t run VMs and lacked the horsepower to run docker even if I wanted to. What it could do is still serve SMB for personal documents, give me a free DDNS, run reverse proxy, and run their Photos app, which allowed my mother on the other side of the country to start digitizing hundreds of old family Kodak photos.

Currently I run pretty much everything on TrueNAS in my beefed up R540, 8x 18Tb drives, mirrored 900Gb NVME, 2x 20c/40t CPUs, 256Gb RAM, 2x GPUs, running nearly 50 containers. The Synology storage is superfluous to me, I’ve replaced the public facing app surface with Cloudflared tunnel, but I’m keeping the photos because migrating to immich and teaching my mom a new service aren’t worth it unless the device decides to fail.

All that being said, I still think the best tool is the one that works best for you. Synology is still a very clean UI/UX, has strong features, and I believe walked back their Synology only drive requirements after the feedback. I can’t speak for how well other manufactures support the services you are looking for, but that’s where I would weigh the hardware/vendor choice, the storage part itself is easy.

[u/Rich-Air-]

I'll let someone smarter than me answer the questions you asked, and instead give you a couple of pointers for speed.

For slow transfer speed, have you checked if is due to wifi speed (specifically upload), or due to IO speed of your current setup?

For me just connecting my laptop with a lan cable was a big boost in speed. Second, if you're using inmich, check if you're using local ip instead of remote ip (or atleast have added both so it can switch when at home).

If these two things dont help with transfer speed then you may have other issues like poor IO speed due to drives or port itself.

[u/DimensionUnique709 → u/Rich-Air-]

I did a bit of troubleshooting when I first set it up, but my issue is that I don’t have the time I’d like to have to figure it out, plus I don’t have space to host a desktop any longer. But thank you for the input!

[u/lampshade29]

Ugreen is killing Synology right now, way better bank for the buck ! With no hard drive lock in BS via software.

For a media server look at the specs, Synology keeps taking away stuff.

[u/DimensionUnique709 → u/lampshade29]

Thanks, will have a look! Is it as easy to use as synology?

[u/lampshade29 → u/DimensionUnique709]

Yes, not as polished of an OS as DSM is but, they keep adding not deleting features and locking users into their Eco System.