Help me with NAS6.0

Builds [LGA1151,LGA1200] NAS Killer 6.0, Plex QSV Builds
1

Hi,
So after I read NAS Killer 6.0 Guide ([Guide] NAS Killer 6.0 - DDR4 is finally cheap - #2 by neldonado), It’s really make me sense.
Before that I stuck at the PC Case/motherboard parts, didn’t know which to choose.

To be honest, I wanted to go with Xpenology, because I hear that they have really much softwares/add-ons to almost everything, but let me know if Unraid will be better.
Here is what I want to make with my NAS.
(Let me know if I can do it with this software)

  1. RAID1 with HDD discs
  2. Automatic backup of images/videos of iPhones (if the program know not to copy duplicate it will be great)
  3. Torrent server - currently I run on my computer qbittorrent download content and transfer to external SSD that connects to NVIDIA Streamer via USB, what I want to do is, torrent server will always run on the NAS when I download something it, after finish it will copy to other directory so I can watch from NVIDIA. It’s the best way to do it? or maybe other way? (in this way there duplicate content on 2 different directories)
  4. VOD server - from the torrent server there will be a directory that there will be all the content so I can play from the NVIDIA streamer (from VLC)

As I’m live in Israel, the prices are different and more expensive then the US.
So here is my list of parts for the NAS, I like to hear you thoughts about it.
NAS1 -

Part Price
Cooler Master N400 108 USD
ASRock b365 Phantom Gaming 160 USD
Intel i5 8500 53 USD
CPU Cooler SST-NT07-115X-USA 42 USD
RAM Corsair 32G (16x2) 3200Mhz CL16 65 USD
Total 428 USD
  • PC Case, RAM, CPU cooler are new, the rest are second hand.
    ** Motherboard comes with bundle with i5 9400f cpu that I can sell later and return some money (but currently the seller of this bundle not answer me)

NAS2 -

Part Price
Case Cooler Master N400 108 USD
ASUS Z370 Pro 50 USD
Intel i5 8400 50 USD
CPU Cooler Arctic Freezer 7 X 6 USD
RAM Corsair 32GB (16x2) 3200Mhz CL16 65 USD
Total 279 USD
  • PC Case, RAM are new, the rest are second hand.
    ** Motherboard, CPU and CPU cooler comes in bundle and they second hand.

I know that for both specifications I need also to add PSU, from what I saw new PSU costs 48 USD depends on the WATT and brand, which PSU needed for this types of systems?

Some questions,

  1. How to create some cache with SSDs? need 2?
  2. For NAS2 configuration how I can be sure that the Motherboard will be good for NAS?
  3. Just curoius, Plex server transcoding is prefer then just stream from HDD?

Regards.

2

I pulled an old PC with a 2nd gen i3, 16GB of RAM, and put xpenology on it, it is running just fine. So I think you’ll be fine with that Z370. You have 6 sata ports to work with which should be enough to put a pretty high capacity system together. You don’t need a whole lot of firepower here.

For CPU size, just put all the parts into https://pcpartpicker.com/ and it will give you a wattage number.

As far as transcoding goes, it really depends on how you’re using plex. Some devices may not be able to play the video as-is and will need transcoding to play in a format it can use. For streaming outside your network you may need to transcode down to lower quality to save on bandwidth. Depends on your use case. If you’re just playing at home on a capable device you may not need transcoding at all.

Also you have many options for photo downloads. You can try synology’s built in photos app which will sync mobile devices and also has image processing to look for and tag objects in your photos (so you could say, do a photo search for something like “guitar” and it will return photos with guitars in them). If you want to get more advanced, you can use docker and open up a whole new world of apps. If you just want a way to save the photos without an interface you can use synology drive to just sync the files themselves.

Also instead of RAID1 look at SHR (Synology Hybrid raid) which gives you the ability to build a single storage pool out of mixed size disks with the ability to upgrade disk sizes and grow the volume size without having to migrate data. It also offers 1 drive protection so if a drive fails you can just replace it with equal or larger size and keep going without data loss. Check out https://www.synology.com/en-us/support/RAID_calculator to calculate what size pool you can get with a set of HDDs in different RAID configurations.