I see that the action on this forum has died down a bit over the last year and I wanted to make sure not a lot has changed in the DIY NAS building world before divining.
I’ve been reading all over the forum and I’ve learn a lot, but there are still a lot of things that sound French when I hear it lol.
I’ve been building gaming computers for decades so I’m used to building computers for gaming, but looking at an efficient NAS is a whole other ballgame.
OS?
I would like to go with UNRaid, seems very slick to visually understand the whole raid.
What I want my nas to do:
The MAIN purpose is a Plex box that could host an average of 5 people streaming from it in a mix of resolutions.
I would also like to use some of it for a picture and file storage for the family.
If I could host some game servers on it, (Minecraft, ARK, RUST etc. for about 10 people)
Would like to dive into this “Home Assistant” I’ve been reading a bit about.
That would be a DREAM build!
Is that too much to ask for one system or does that sound like more than one system to do it all?
As for money, I’m not loaded, but I’ll splurge for my families enjoyment
Would the NAS Killer 6.0 do all that or would I need to beef it up some places?
Id recommend not having your nas and plex server on the same box… plex on a small pc with igpu transcoding works like a charm and they cost next to nothing… i run one for my shared 1080p media and have another local server for my 4k content that i dont share… total cost for two 8th gen SFF HP PCs was around $300 CAD
Currently i run my NAS (unRaid) on the original 2011 build with dual 10GBE rj45 nics… im sure you could build this anywhere from 200-500 CAD with a SAS controller… it just depends on what class of cpu you go for… i still run a few dockers on unRAId but i’ve moved most services off as i’ve migrated to playing around with Proxmox clusters, Kubernetes and high availability…
Again seperating boxes has definitely made life easier because the plex boxes have been running for 5 years straight no hassle, but ive had to tale down my unRaid for various reasons such as upgrades and having all the docker services elsewhere they dont go down with the NAS offline.
My game server is alsp my local AI LLM so having it seperate is a must IMO.
Power to you if you combine everything into 1 machine but i just think that makes it more expensive, less flexible for upgrades and more headaches if something goes wrong.
Good luck and have fun building everything… all the old build forums are still totally useful and updated when needed
Splurge on sweet SAS drives, SSDs and a bunch of spares
Thanks for responding! So, do you jus have the plex box to decode and then have it pull from the NAS for the actual movie storage or does it have its own storage? I’ve A LOT of media for plex so I thought a NAS is the way to go, right now they are just on external and internal drives lol on my main gaming PC lol.
I am still struggling with the BEST way to handle all the things I want to do. I might be jumping in too fast lol.
Depending on the requirements for the game servers, an NK6 can probably handle all of your needs just fine. We used to recommend splitting off the quicksync duties to an affordable separate box because the affordable storage hardware couldn’t do it, but with systems such as the NK6 and other modern Intel hardware, you CAN do it all in one. You can also do it separately.
Others, nowadays, might recommend more along the lines of storage and media serving on a machine and things like the game servers on a separate unit just to keep the storage separate and functioning even if something happens to go wrong with things you’re playing with, like the game servers.
I think I’ll look into finding something to do the plex server on, and then go with some version of the NK6 storage.
I’ll wait on the game servers for now, as well as the Home Assistant and learning about dockers lol. I just want to get the Plex going on something smoother and off my gaming pc lol.
Now to find something to build for both
When I have a parts list, is there a good channel in the discord or post in here I can get a parts review on?
