NAS HDD for Plex or Jellyfin 4k streams

[Onkst]

Hi All,

While this topic may not be directly relevant to everyone, I would greatly appreciate any insights, opinions, or comments you might have.

I have recently bought my first NAS Asustor AS5402T (2 bay HDD, 3 SSD) trying to get my feet wet inthe NAS world.
Here is/was my current usecase/ requirement:

• Plex 4k (8 clients stream),
• Realtime Transcoding support
• Virtualization support,
• HDMI port is must
• Containerization / docker support
• m.2 nvme slots (possibility in future, I will add)
• Less noise (difficult)
• Long term availability of expansions,
• VPN server (all of them have)
• Good DSM support/ updates.

Current options for HDD:

1. Use old/ refurished DELL Enterprise 4TB x2 HDDs. This I could get at 9k for both. This is probably cheapest option but I will end up with 8TB storage only!
2. Buy New. Following options:
   1. Western Digital Red 4TB NAS Hard Disk Drives :14k
      
      
   2. Seagate IronWolf 3.5 Inches SATA 6 Gb/s 5900 RPM 64 MB Cache 4 TB
      

Please help me choose:
Note:
I can cheapout, this NAS data is not that important. Also, I already have cloud storage for backup of important files.
I might not even need to do full RAID config.

 

[tapmal5]

Try to get the biggest nas (Seagate or WD) drive you can afford even if you plan to buy one drive at a time.

 

[jigarpatel]

I think Western Digital Red is SMR drives and Seagate IronWolf is CMR drives.

Check reddit or similar forums weather SMR or CMR drive will have impact on your requirements.

When I built my own NAS box, I wanted to use ZFS file system for RAID, and CMR drives were recommended for ZFS, hence brought Seagate Ironwolf.

 

[rwnano]

How to host FLAC files in nas and play them from my Ubuntu laptop based streamer.?

 

[jigarpatel]

How to host FLAC files in nas and play them from my Ubuntu laptop based streamer.?

I am running Logitech Media Server docker container on NAS, Using Raspberry PI Zero 2w with PiCorePlayer as streamer.

There are many such open source options available, like Logitech Media Server.