Hi everyone. I’m on the verge of building a new NAS/Media server, and wanted to check here to see if any of you could provide some recommendations based on my goals (below) or your current builds. I currently have a Raspberry Pi 4 running some basic services (Portainer, Home Assistant, Plex, sonarr/radarr/prowlarr, sabnzbd, etc.), but would like to expand my options and capabilities as my interests in the hobby grow.

My goals:

  • Ability to have 4+ 1080p streams on Plex. Right now my Pi works surprisingly well at home with one 1080 stream, but basically shits its pants doing much more. Would like to give my parents and a friend or two access.

  • Document storage/backup. Interested in Nextcloud, but it seems people have mixed experiences here.

  • Photo storage/backup.

  • Hosting the services mentioned above, plus some extra headroom for others. I’ll probably move back to Home Assistant OS on my Pi, unless you think I should utilize it for something else.

  • OS - unRaid. Not opposed to others, but this does seem to be a great option with a lot of how-guides and videos available.

  • Storage/Drives - I honestly don’t know how much I want or need. As it stands, my partner and I probably have less than 1TB of files and photos between the two of us (being very generous with that figure). Would like to expand the media server capabilities as mentioned above.

  • Budget - $1000 max including drives.

While the details above are what I would like to achieve with this, you can also consider me an empty canvas. Open to all ideas and suggestions. Let me know if there are other details I can provide that would be helpful. Lastly, thank you all for creating such a great community here.

  • @WFloyd
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    110 months ago

    The first two died within 30 days, the second one took about 4 months I think. Not a huge sample size, but it kind of matches the typical hard drive failure bathtub curve.

    I just double checked, and mine were actually from a similar seller on Amazon - they all seem to be from the same supplier though - the warranty card and packaging are identical. So ymmv?

    Warranty was easy, I emailed the email address included in the warranty slip, gave details on order number + drive serial number, and they sent me a mailing slip within 1 business day. Print that out, put the drive back in the box it shipped with (I always save these), tape it up and drop it off for shipping. In my case, it was a refund of the purchase pretty much as soon as it was delivered to the seller.

    • @PoopMonster
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      110 months ago

      Well that kinda sucks hopefully you had time to replace/repair without data loss.

      • @WFloyd
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        110 months ago

        Yeah, no data loss, rebuilt within 48 hours each time. 10TB is a nice balance that doesn’t have such long rebuild times