I want to upgrade my Synology NAS which currently have seven 6TB drives running on SHR2. I’m slowly creeping towards the max capacity and have been thinking about what to do.
I have about 10 more of these drives just laying around so I was thinking of just building another NAS with them but that will be complicate things with Plex. I also have a ton of industrial grade 2TB SSDs but I don’t have a use for them, are there any NAS solutions for them?
Would making a seperate NAS with the spare drives but only putting movies/shows on it for plex be a good solution? My current one has a lot of personal videos/pictures that I don’t use with Plex. My main concern is just the complications with having new NAS. If one day I decide to consolidate them all, would that be a problem? I’m currently running Synology hardware but what if I want to move it out of the ecosystem?
A low-end motherboards usually have only 4 native SATA ports, the ones with more are costly. You will need a extra pci-e sata raid card (4 a 6 ports, usually), but they are dirt cheap.
If you are use mostly as a Plex box, a Linux with Docker/Portaineir is good enough. But you can explore some ‘storage oriented’ distros, like Unraid (non-free, but isn’t costly), who also can run a dockerized Plex without problems.
I am very partial about of use of MergerFS storage, the ‘poor man raid’, as I said. Without redundancy or disaster recovery, but easy and cheaper to build.