My new NAS: Synology DS918+

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FlyingPenguin
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My new NAS: Synology DS918+

Post by FlyingPenguin »

My old Unraid NAS is getting a little long in the tooth. It's 6 years old with the original four 2TB WDC drives. It's been a rock solid reliable NAS but after 6 years I can certainly expect a failure any day now, plus I'm close to filling the 6 TBs of storage.

After much research I picked up a Synology DS918+ and four 4TB WDC Red drives. Nice unit and WAY faster (especially on writes) than my old Unraid box.

Just using it as a straight NAS box for now, but I got the DS918+ because it supports Plex and I might want to play with that down the road.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075N1Z9LT

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Losbot
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Re: My new NAS: Synology DS918+

Post by Losbot »

Plex is UBER EASY to setup on the Synology. When you've got your Plex account setup and you deploy it on the Synology, let me know and we can share with each other. I have like 6 people that share with me and I share with about 10 people.
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b-man1
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Re: My new NAS: Synology DS918+

Post by b-man1 »

Cool...I've been thinking about going the NAS route for quite a while. What's the real world power usage on that, if you happen to have a kill-a-watt or something to measure it with?
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Losbot
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Re: My new NAS: Synology DS918+

Post by Losbot »

Mine is an 8 slot and I can tell you when I re-do my office this weekend. I bought a new 42U rack to put all my stuff into, so I'll hook it up by itself to the Kill-A-Watt I've got and see.
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Re: My new NAS: Synology DS918+

Post by FlyingPenguin »

No idea on power usage but can't imagine it's much. Drives spin down when not in use.
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Re: My new NAS: Synology DS918+

Post by FlyingPenguin »

Nice unit. WAY faster than my old UnRAID box. Especially write speeds.
Took a full day to copy 5TB from the old box to the new one. I setup the new box with the same IP and hostname as the old one so all the Media Center PCs could find it without having to tediously reconfigure the media libraries on all of them. Big performance difference. The media center PCs want to index the shares when you open a library, and that used to sometimes cause long delays. Much faster now.

I'm debating whether to add an M.2 SSD for caching. Not sure if it would make that much of a performance difference for the large media files I'm using it for. I'll have to do some research.
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Genom
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Re: My new NAS: Synology DS918+

Post by Genom »

I am curious to see how plex sharing with others works. Anybody interested in sharing with me so I can try it out?

And know how to set it up?
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Losbot
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Re: My new NAS: Synology DS918+

Post by Losbot »

Set up your account and let me know your email address. I'll share with you if you share back. I've been sharing stuff for a year now.
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Genom
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Re: My new NAS: Synology DS918+

Post by Genom »

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Losbot
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Re: My new NAS: Synology DS918+

Post by Losbot »

Invite sent. You should be able to log in and watch my collection. On your end, you'd select the libraries you'd like to share with me.
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Genom
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Re: My new NAS: Synology DS918+

Post by Genom »

Wow, this works surprisingly well. What is your upload speed? I set mine to 5Mb. Let me know how it looks on your end (not sure about my transcode settings since I dont usually need them)
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Re: My new NAS: Synology DS918+

Post by Losbot »

Most settings you don't need to touch. My Internet upload speed is 20 Mbps. I set my upload max on Plex to 8Mbps, which is supposed to support 1080p. Can't wait until the Gig service gets to our house. They've been tearing up things and laying fiber along the perimeter of the community. Fingers crossed.

I'll try streaming from yours now.
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Losbot
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Re: My new NAS: Synology DS918+

Post by Losbot »

OK. I watched some TV and a movie. I guess you're limiting the stream or your connection is slow. It was sticking to 480p and sometimes I could get 720p but that was rare. It did cause the quality to suffer some. Do you have room to bump it up to at least 5Mbps if not 8?
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Genom
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Re: My new NAS: Synology DS918+

Post by Genom »

I went ahead and told it to use 8. Lets see if it works, and if it impacts my other use.
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Cap
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Re: My new NAS: Synology DS918+

Post by Cap »

Feel free to share with CapStudio@gmail.com :-)
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