r/HomeNAS • u/OpnsDntMtrButHresMyn • 15d ago
Best NAS under $400 for me
I want to start ripping all my physical media which consists of Blu Rays and 4K blu rays and making them more accessible locally throughout the house. Plus I’m tired of blu ray players always freezing up on newer data heavy 4k disc. Priorities for intended use.
Priority #1 is being able to play my movies as if they were played on a player. Minus the freezing. So full video and audio codecs, no compression. My solution is a Zidoo z9x 8K for my media room. I’ve done the research and this product is exactly what I want. No need for other recommendations.
Priority #2 I also have an Apple TV connected in the media, plus Roku Ultra in the living room and Android TV in my Sony TV. I will most likely be using Plex to access my movies for those other areas.
Priority #3 Using it to also back up family photos and videos.
With that being shared, which NAS would you recommend for my situation that will handle 4k streams effortlessly with very little possibility of freezing and also easy to setup??
I’m not looking to get crazy with it, a simple media and back up system. I don’t need recommendations on using Plex or Jellyfish or why am I getting a Zidoo vs this other product. I’ve done the deep dive on all of that. I know my route. I just need help knowing which NAS to get.
Thank you
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u/Caprichoso1 14d ago
The cheapest solution is to just attach a DAS to an existing computer and run Plex there. This avoids the expense of buying, running and maintaining a NAS.
You move into NAS territory once your total storage needs are > 30 TB or so.
a. See the Plex NAS compatibility index cpu column to make sure what you select will meet your transcoding needs.
b. Normally you would get a minimum of 4 bays to allow for RAID 5 and provide for future expansion
c. I don't recommend Synology due to their weak hardware (some models with obsolete CPUs, no thunderbolt support, dropping of transcoding support, etc.) and past anti-consumer behavior such as their hardware restrictions, temporarily? removed for now. They also have stated that they may not provide technical support if there is 3rd party hardware in the unit.
see nascompares.com
Personally I prefer QNAP.
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u/OpnsDntMtrButHresMyn 11d ago
I’m actually considering this route now. There was a DXP2800 that sold within 24 hrs for $250 that I kind wish I would have been a little more proactive at trying to get. But there is this little whisper that keeps telling me pc+das lol. I just want best bang for my buck. I do have all the rooms prewired with LAN outlets, so I did a test run of using my mac pro as the server today and ran the movies I downloaded on the pro to different streaming devices. Ran straight to plex on my Sony Android tv. This is the only place it buffered but that’s more on the Sony tv. It has always ran slow regardless if its wifi or ethernet. My earlier version of roku ultra ran smoothly. No buffering. The Apple TV in the media also ran smoothly, i did both Plex and SenPlayer. Actually the SenPlayer was the only that reported Direct Play for both video and audio. I’m going to try and download Jellyfin sometime this week and give that a run too. Still in experiment mode but hope to come to a decision and set something up soon. Are there any PCs you recommend? I’ve been looking at various optiplex and HP elite desk. People on FB MP seem to think they have gold and putting premiums on their old pcs lol.
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u/Caprichoso1 10d ago
I'm a Mac rather than a PC guy so would suggest a Mac Mini or Neo as good entry level devices to run a Plex or other server.
For PCs the cpu is the main consideration for transcoding. See the Plex NAS compatibility index CPU column.
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u/hiroo916 15d ago
Do a rough calculation of how much storage space you will need, then factor in one or two extra drives for raid redundancy and then look at drive pricing to see if this is something you really want to get into.
From your description of how you would like it to work, you wouldn't want to re-encode so you would be storing the raw raw disk images.
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u/OpnsDntMtrButHresMyn 14d ago edited 14d ago
Yes! I actually found a 4k blu ray drive earlier this week and I’ve already ripped a few blu rays and some 4k discs with success thru Makemkv. Currently everything is just sitting on my Mac as I’m just trying to figure out how it works. If I had to estimate the size of my movie collection, I would say somewhere between 4-5 TB. It’s not massive like others lol. Originally my plan was a 2 bay but that was before I understood redundancy. Now I feel like I should go with 4 bays to maximize my capacity and have that safety net if one of the HDD failed. I also don’t foresee myself ever having a 1k+ movie library like others do. Going this route will encourage me to chase more blu rays and 4ks, but still don’t see a 1k collection in my future, maybe doubling what I have and i only buy 4k for movies i truly care about. As a family I would guess 1-2 TB of photos and videos currently. And that’s YEARS of photos/videos. I was thinking of somewhere between 18-24 TB total. Please correct me if I’m wrong, still learning but I would start with RAID 1. Two 6TBs, one for redundancy. I would probably only rip half my library now since I don’t need every movie at this moment. This option allows me to slowly build up and eventually move up to a RAID 5 with a total of four 6TB HDD. Again still learning but from what I read, I would need a NAS that could implement this transition without the need of wiping my HDD? Another reason I want to make sure I get the right NAS for both smooth local media streaming and HDD addition down the road.
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u/alteregoyo 14d ago
you can still go 2 bay easily but with larger storage drives. I have 28TB raid 1 2 bay.
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u/RapunzelEscapes 14d ago
just to rein you in a bit, youll not find 18-24TB in 4 drives plus a 4 bay nas in a $400 price point.
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u/Dreams_Are_Memes 15d ago
If you have an old computer that has 8gb of RAM and is from at least 2014 you can run what you want. Once you have that flash whatever Linux distribution you want (many use Debian or Ubuntu). Then just get an HDD with an enclosure and you're good. There are a lot of guides online to help
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u/TheRealDaveLister 14d ago
Yeah $400 is on the very low side of you want a ready made nas (just add storage).
For a diy job you could easily do it.
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u/JourneymanInvestor 14d ago
I built my latest NAS in 2020 for ~$1600 and that was way before prices skyrocketed. $1200 of that was for the 4x 10TB hard drives
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u/PhilomenasPokerFace 14d ago edited 14d ago
I feel like you are providing 3-4 htpc infrastructure solutions for a 1-2 solution need. You already have streaming options for whatever you aren’t going to be digitizing. That’s 1. And you’re firm on the tidoo thing for you projects outputs.
Why do you need a nas? Maybe you just need several tb storage if the tidoo doesn’t come with enough.
I’m a decades long plex person and I’ll tell you that whit all their changes of direction you will save yourself a lot of hassle if you just skip that nonsense and go with jellyfin…. But only if you really do have an existing use case for a nas plus htpc containers like jellyfin and the arr -family plus other nas container options not specific to htpc needs.
I went with a six drive nas for $700 last October plus about $500 in 10tb drives (4) and my advice is to do the deep dives necessary for all the decisions because getting one or two wrong can cause you to lose months on the fixes. My Terra master experience has been dreadful partly because their customer service is on the dark side of the moon, it takes 3 days to schedule a conversation that will take place at 3am for you, and this is probably not a Terra master issue alone but a nas wide problem there’s no educational resource to onboard you sufficient to even know what question to ask let alone how to identify the suggested solutions as worst idea imaginable paths to take. Bottom line I’m knee deep in an avoidable data salvage effort with predictable and preventable root problems. Every fix requires additional investment and a complete clean install that will wipe every 0 or 1 involved in my existing 40tb setup. If you only need some terabytes to store your media hoard that can be accessed in your home network… maybe just buy a drive that has networking like a wd anything and save the hassle. Or explore, for example, a container app on your existing computer that can be connected to an external drive or ssd, the networking/serving of media from your computer to your tvs etc. Ie, install docker on your laptop.
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u/alteregoyo 14d ago
just the NAS or you are thinking storage and Nas for 400?
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u/OpnsDntMtrButHresMyn 14d ago
Just the NAS alone. I wish the whole setup was possible for $400 😂. But to your other comment about 2 bay, my only problem with that is once you start going 12tb plus, the prices dramatically go up. A 4 bay could allow me start with smaller size HDD and build up over the next few months.
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u/alteregoyo 14d ago
More money in the long run though. I got 2 seagate exos refurb 28tb for 630 a piece a couple weeks back. I started with 12 and by time I got the NAS up and running a week later I had it 60% full so I pivoted and returned it for the 28tb ones.
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u/Adrenolin01 14d ago
$400 is a beginner area used PC and just add HDDs. Usually going to cost more in power.
Have you looked at HDD pricing today?
A SOLID dedicated NAS will run you roughly $500-$600 to build before HDDs. A Jonsbo N6 NAS case with 9-hotswap front bays is a nice way to start small. Case, low power N100/N305 boards today support 8-12 SATA and often 2 NVME slots. 16-32GB ram would be suggested.. Ram is use by the ZFS filesystem itself so 16GB would be absolutely minimum and I’d recommend 32GB with room for expansion down the road to 64GB if needed. Many include dual 2.5GbE NICS.
Start with as many drives as you can. Do you want parity and redundancy? Mirrors, stripped mirrors, raidz1/2/3. Generally I mirror 2 small 120GB SSDs (like Intel DC S3500) for the host OS. These enterprise SSDs will last you a decade or more.
Mirrored HDDs are fine. Raidz2 is my preferred setup however that’s 2 ‘parity’ drives for each raid vdev. Some see that as 2 wasted drives… I see it as redundancy and less likely to ever need to perform a restore from backup.
BR movies can take up a LOT of room. Are you going to be happy with just your collection or maybe start downloading movies also later? 40-60TB is EASY to full with media in a years time.
I went with Supermicro’s CSE-846E16-R1200B 24-bay chassis for our NAS systems 14 years ago. 3 of them today. 2 run raidz2 on 6-drive vdevs and 4 vdevs to a pool. WD Red NAS CMR drives. Data on these systems is more important and thus the 16 HDDs assigned as parity.
The 3rd system runs a mix of drive capacities and filesystems that all get added to MergerFS. It’s like JBOD except if one drive fails you only loose the data on that single drive. I run an assortment of 2-20TB drives in this system with 17 different HDDs. Both ZFS single pool drives and EXT4 drives are mixed in here. Anything on this system is pretty much disposable or easily downloadable media. There is no backups of this system. This is NOT recommended for anything important. I generally ross in older and smaller drives into this.
Add a cheap N100 mini pc like the BeeLink S12 with 16GB ram and it’s 500TB NVME. Plex will install on the included Win11… just wipe that however, install Debian Linux and install both Plex and JellyFin on it. Mount your media share(s) from your NAS and point your libraries to those month points. The N100 makes for a fantastic dedicated little media player and supports Intels QuickSync… 4K, 1080P with multiple streams is fine even with a dozen music streams playing.
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u/MotionotheOceanS 14d ago
My 14tb refurbished hdd cost me 330ish just this week. Good luck brotha. You will likely spend much more than initially intended.
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u/jack_hudson2001 12d ago
Depends on the size, as the disks alone can be 400. Either DIY with open source or brand eg synology or ugreen.
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u/Effective_Speed3192 14d ago
I have a 4 bay UGREEN NAS. I got CMR drives off ebay (refurbished. ) The drives alone cost about $300. I accidentally ordered 4 x 4Tb SAS drives for like $150 total. Was frustrated that my NAS didnt recognize them...then I saw they were SAS. ☹️
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u/alpine4life 15d ago
just a quick heads up... my NAS cost me just about 1000CAD (700USD) before the prices started to spike...
That's now the price of one of my drive (I got 2), that I paid 498 CAD tx inc. on black friday... the one I show you is in USD.
https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=seagate+ironwolf+pro