Is a NAS with Raspberry Pi 4 and OMV and Plex media server worth it? reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Specialist_Spite5930 · 2023-12-22 14:37 Hey guys, As the title suggests, I have a chance to acquire a Raspberry Pi 4 (2 GB) version, and the first thing that I found a lot on this sub-reddit was hosting your own NAS (also you guys are so supportive here, I love it) Given that my Raspberry Pi 4 is only 2 GB, and I mostly plan to use my 4k Bluray media content from my Plex server on my TV (also 4k), don't you guys think this is overloading the Raspberry Pi 4 a bit? Later on, I also plan to host a Nextcloud or Owncloud server, and to secure all of this, I would also run NordVPN meshnet on my Pi (which I don't know to full depth if is the most secure option if I already have a NordVPN subscription, thoughts please?) Do you guys think it is a good idea to setup so many services on my Pi4, because I also read online that it can catch on fire and burn when overloaded. I do not want a fire hazard at any cost, so want to make sure if anyone here is running a similar setup out there. Happy holidays and happy hosting :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- liveyourdreamsmax · 2023-12-22 14:49 2GB ram would be limiting. Try it out, or search for people trying to stream 4k plex via rpi. It can run next/owncloud and a vpn. For the NAS portion your storage would be external then, via USB? Not ideal. 7th-9th gen intel SFF desktops can have HDDs installed (check each SFF bay availability) and would do everything you need easily. I got a i5-7xxx HP G3 800 SFF for $85 on ebay. Added a m.2 nvme boot drive and 2x 3.5HDDs for my setup. If you had the rpi already id say go for it, but i think it'd be hardware-limited for 4k streaming plus other services. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Specialist_Spite5930 · 2023-12-22 14:55 >For the NAS portion your storage would be external then, via USB? Yes that's correct! I am planning to use a 2TB external Sandisk HDD as the main storage unit. And since there are no SATA ports available for rpi4, I am throwing any sort of RAID setup out. Ah so I checked this SFF desktops stuff, but in my area they are about 1500 USD (that's wayyyy over my budget). But maybe I can go your way and try to find something secondhand in that case. And you're right, it makes sense to have multiple HDDs attached, which in turn might also enable me to have RAID support. So I guess then it's a no for the rpi4 NAS setup at the moment for me. But thank you for answer, it gives me a good direction to look into. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- liveyourdreamsmax · 2023-12-22 14:57 What's your area? I went off ebay for mine but I'm in US. Highly recommend secondhand. I bought without an OS or drive since it was cheaper and I could add the drives I want. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Specialist_Spite5930 · 2023-12-22 15:01 Ah I'm in Switzerland! Stuff here is very expensive, so I think secondhand makes sense as you said. Also, do you think it would work if I try to bag a secondhand computer instead? I could install 3 HDDs, but if the hardware is very old, do you think that would give decent performance for a NAS? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Specialist_Spite5930 · 2023-12-22 15:08 Sorry, but a followup question. Given that I also have an Apple TV 4k box, which supports hardware decoding (I might be super wrong about this, as I only read a little bit now), so in theory, my rpi4 would only need to serve the files to the Plex client on my TV. Do you think even then the 2GB ram would be limiting? Just a thought, not sure if this is a right thought or even goes in the right direction,but opinions? :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Faith-in-Strangers · 2023-12-22 15:14 I do it, and a few more docker containers and my 4gb only uses half of the RAM. If you plan on watching 4K, make sure the device playing the media can encode (some tvs do, Apple TV does) Check out my post on this sub from some time ago ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Specialist_Spite5930 · 2023-12-22 15:15 Ah really! So then there should be a little hope here. Yes thank you so much, I will look at your old post! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Whyd0Iboth3r · 2023-12-22 15:27 Any Pi, used as a plex server, cannot transcode much at all. Especially not 4k. But, as long as you don't try to push more bandwidth the device can handle, it can serve 4k content all day. 50-90Mbps is nothing on a Pi 4 with gigabit ethernet. It will work if its only 1 or 2 devices at a time. Just make sure the players are set to direct play. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Specialist_Spite5930 · 2023-12-22 15:30 Yes I completely agree! I read that transcoding requires much better hardware than rpi4, and which I why I was wondering about my Apple TV 4k box. I mainly plan to serve 4k on my TV, and that would be the only device, so for now as per your suggestions, I think the rpi4 should manage. ​ >Just make sure the players are set to direct play. Ah I need to make a note of this and check how to enable this on the Apple TV 4k. Thank you very much for your reply! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Faith-in-Strangers · 2023-12-22 15:32 It still might be a stretch! I also can’t recommend enough using an SSD with a sata to usb3 adapter instead of the SD card for the OS. How much are you paying for this ? While my RPI4 is enough, I’m about to buy a Beelink N100 with 16gb of ram for 250€ so I can run more things and play Plex on more devices ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Specialist_Spite5930 · 2023-12-22 15:42 Ah I see. Yes given that my main storage is a 8 year old HDD, I am not expecting very great (or even that good) read/write speeds. But since I first wanted to try out if I can even setup a NAS and Nextcloud server on an rpi4 before getting all correct hardware (which in this case would be a SATA SSD). So overall I'm paying about 60 USD for the rpi4, and some 20 USD more for the charger, the MicroSD for the OS, and a powered USB hub. Should come out to around 100 bucks including the case and any minor thing that I would need to pickup. ​ >I’m about to buy a Beelink N100 with 16gb of ram I actually didn't get what this is with a quick google search. Is this more like a headless computer which you plan to use to host your OMV servers, or you plan to use this as a NAS? Sorry I'm not very good with hardware, trying to get to a level where I don't make a fool of myself by taking nonsense though ---------------------------------------------------------------------- liveyourdreamsmax · 2023-12-22 15:53 For a NAS, you do not need much compute power. To stream videos generally you just need storage and the ability to run a DLNA server (very very lightweight). Plex, Jellyfin, and other media services run a DLNA server within it by default. Fair warning, I don't know a ton about media formats, transcoding, etc. Just the basics. When your source media files are not the same format as supported on the client (Roku, smart TV, phone, etc) then your NAS device needs to do transcoding. That means 'on-the-fly' conversion of the source media files into a format that the client device supports. RPI4 might be able to do some of that, but 4k streams I don't know if it could. A 7th-gen intel CPU can easily handle this transcoding. Even though it's old by other standards....for this it is plenty. I run OpenMediaVault (an operating system) in which I have containers for Jellyfin (alternative to Plex), immich, and play with a few others but JF and immich are the only full-time services running. My ram usage sits around 3-4GB, power draw at idle is 14-15watts with two 3.5HDD (12 TB each), and CPU usage doesn't go above 30 or 40 % except when I dump a bunch of photos into immich and its running facial recognition or something like that. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Faith-in-Strangers · 2023-12-22 15:53 So when I mentioned the SSD I meant as the drive which will contain the operating system, not the data and content you want to store. I’d suggest separating that, but if you can’t, you can still use that hdd, will probably be more reliable than the SD card. The n100 is an intel chip, low powered with video encoding capabilities. It’s quite popular and being added to a bunch of minipc. It can be used as a regular computer with windows 11, but yeah, I plan on using it as the “head” of my home server, doing the heavy lifting and using the Pi only for basic NAS capabilities. My point was that for a little bit more money you get something much better. Pis don’t really have a good price/performance ratio anymore, but they are still useful devices) If you don’t have the budget, the Pi is quite good to get yours hands dirty and try it out. OMV + Docker (Homepage+Filebrowser+Plex) could run with 2gb of ram. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Faith-in-Strangers · 2023-12-22 15:57 Honestly these days I’d rather get cheaper WD my books and plug that to a minipc with usb3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mediocre_Tax969 · 2023-12-22 16:03 Rasp pi 4 8gb Buy the argon eon works Put a ssd in it And install truenas ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Faith-in-Strangers · 2023-12-22 16:08 I also read your post again, Nextcloud uses a lot of ressources, so maybe it’s best to start with something with more ram from the get go ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Specialist_Spite5930 · 2023-12-22 16:22 Oh damn! I mean I think to get my hands dirty and get a sort of trial run, I will first create a NAS with the rpi4, install nordvpn on it, add it to the meshnet for remote access, and that's it! Once I am satisfied with the NAS setup, I could go and tryout Owncloud or Nextcloud just to check what I can get out of these. Maybe as a finale, I can try running both services simultaneously for a month or so to try out. If the performance is unsatisfactory (which I am more leaning towards already), I can then consider buying either an SFF to setup all these services there since compute and storage (Multiple HDDs, RAID array support) wouldn't be a problem.