My Budget NAS

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    I've never had a NAS before so a lot of this is new to me. My wife and I decided to get rid of all our DVDs, to free up some space, so I've been ripping them over the last week. Our TV (Hisense) only supports Plex so that's one decision that is made for us. I was originally planning to get a Synology NAS, but this year has been hard on us financially, so it was time to get creative and find the cheapest possible solution...


    Today my HP EliteDesk 800 G2 arrived. This is a refurbished unit I managed to pick up for $85 (Australian dollars). It's supposed to be "small form factor" (SFF) but it's actually not much smaller than a standard desktop. I needed a chassis that would hold two 3.5" HDDs - which is not commonly found in the SFF world - so I'm not complaining. This is the "enterprise" model that includes an optical drive, as an added bonus, and a 240Gb SSD with Windows 10 pre-installed... but I will soon be replacing that with OMV.


    Thank God for Black Friday sales... I was able to get two Seagate IronWolf 4TB 3.5" NAS Hard Drives for $134 each. They're on the way and as soon as they arrive I'll be installing them and setting them up as a RAID 1 mirrored array.


    So, here I am. For a total outlay of $353, not much more than the cost of a diskless Synology NAS, I will soon (hopefully!) have a device capable of serving up all our movies, photos, and music.


    A couple of questions:

    • There is currently a "25% off Lifetime Plex Pass" deal - is this worth it?
      • Reading through the Plex Pass features list it's difficult for me to see what I'm paying for (other than hardware transcoding, which I hope to avoid by using handbrake to transcode all my DVDs to H.264 MP4s.)
    • What filesystem is everyone using these days?
      • I assume the default will be ext4 but btrfs includes support for RAID as part of the filesystem - is that worth looking at?

  • crashtest

    Approved the thread.
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    I don't know what persuaded you to use a RAID 1 mirror array on your NAS. The are many threads on the subject of "RAID" in this forum with strong opinions expressed both for and against its use. One thing that is agreed is that RAID of any kind is NOT a substitute for proper backups on an external device with a tested restore procedure.


    You are correct to assume EXT4 is the most commonly used fs on MD RAID. Using BTRFS with a RAID1 profile is certainly worth considering if you value its enhanced "data integrity" with automatic detection of silent data corruption and snapshot function. BTRFS does have its quirks and gotchas, and requires a bit of maintenance, but for the home user it offers the flexibility of easy expansion when replacing or adding additional drives which don't have to be of the same size. With BTRFS RAID, drive replacement and addition takes place while the filesystem remains online.


    In contrast, to properly expand a MD RAID1 from 2 to 3 disks means "reshaping" from RAID1 to RAID5, a tricky and time consuming process which may not be successful.


    I'm sure you can find a more detailed cf of traditional MD RAID and BTRFS RAID on the net. If you are already acquainted with the central role played by "shared folders" in OMV, then for a BTRFS filesystem every new "shared folder" is created as a "BTRFS subvolume" of which you can take multiple snapshots. SMB shares are configured automatically to make snapshots of data available as "previous versions" in MS file explorer.


    If your stored data is mostly static in nature ( your media libraries) then regular scheduled snapshots are not relevant but a single snapshot can protect against accidental deletion/modification of data so are still very useful.

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