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.

  • QHCEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    It sounds like you are looking to build custom, but just to provide an option I’ll recommend Synology. I use a DS418play and it does everything you mentioned and more.

    Hardware acceleration for Plex requires it to be run as a Synology package but everything else is set up in Docker.

    Another nice thing is their hybrid not-really-raid scheme allows you to mix drive capacity, which helps as you are starting out and not sure how much you need yet.