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:
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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.
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Document storage/backup. Interested in Nextcloud, but it seems people have mixed experiences here.
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Photo storage/backup.
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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.
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OS - unRaid. Not opposed to others, but this does seem to be a great option with a lot of how-guides and videos available.
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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.
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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.
I’ll probably start out with just letting my parents access Plex to see how it performs. They would be remotely streaming off an Apple TV, so I’m not entirely sure how much, if any, transcoding will be needed. My other issue is that transcoding is uncharted territory for me, so I should probably work on getting a better understanding of how/when it might come into play in my situation.
Everything else you described sounds like it would fulfill what I’m looking for. I don’t plan on solely hosting “mission critical” aspects of my life on this (at least for now while I continue to learn and possibly break things), but it would help me take the training wheels off my bike.
Happy to help. As I have it configured, my local network is set to prefer direct play, so any transcoding gets done from connections that traverse the boundary of my network. If you don’t live with your parents this would likely apply.
Transcoding may also occur when you have subtitled content and I believe for certain audio formats, but the transcoding would be limited to the audio track.