Curious what was the model of your drive failure? I have 6 years now on a bunch of 8TB WD Elements/EasyStore drives as well as some 10TB-14TB WD MyBook, Elements, and refurbished WD drives from serverpartdeals in the preceding years. Still no failures yet but I’m expecting one eventually.
I’m currently running mine on Windows and use SnapRAID and DrivePool as my defense against drive failures. I think I have 7 data drives and 2 parity at this point (totalling around 90TB). Beyond that I copy the Snapraid whatchamacallit to a separate backup drive along with my OS drive. This isn’t really a ‘backup’ but in the scenario where I have several failures and no way to restore, I still have radarr/sonarr keeping track of my library and a membership to several private trackers.
I wouldn’t worry too much about losing media files as most can just be downloaded again. I find it more beneficial to make use of all the storage space you can rather than trying to do a 1:1 backup, which gets pretty absurd once you start getting up there in movie/TV count.
You can still use one of these with the NAS as storage. A Synology doesn’t have a lot of horsepower to run programs directly on their hardware so if you plan on doing something like a media server you might encounter some issues. An optiplex (or any other PC) running Proxmox will let you run a bunch of different containers or VMs separately
You might look for a used Optiplex SFF or micro form factor PC. These can be purchased for around $100 in the US and have full fledged PC hardware which is capable of running most things. The downside here is less peripheral support for things like PCIE or internal storage.
I have a bunch of WD HDDs (9) in my Fractal Design Define R7 case sitting on top of my desk, about 2ft away at ear level, and can barely hear them. If anything the hum of the fans is what I can hear most (though still quiet). I have a security camera NVR with a little 40mm fan 12ft away on top of a high shelf in my office and I can hear it over my server by quite a large margin.
Even if rebuilding it today, I’d go for HDDs as you can’t buy 12, 14, 18TB, etc SSDs for a couple hundred bucks and you won’t really gain any benefit using SSD over HDD as reading large movie files from a disk isn’t going to saturate the drive cache and you won’t be dealing with random seeking.
You said you might upgrade all the drives in the future but how (2nd NAS?) and what will you do with the old ones? 4x4TB is going to fill up pretty fast especially when you’re first starting out and eager to add new titles.
The Dell Optiplex micro form factor might be a good option. You can get them cheap on the second hand market (at least here in the US).
Considering the 5 isn’t even being sold yet, I question the validity of your anecdote. The 3B and 4/4B are still hit or miss as far as stock goes. I just bought a 3B from Digikey and it’s the first I’ve seen them in stock since before COVID though it’s not as if I’ve been checking rpilocator daily for updates.
There’s definitely an argument for not supporting the Pi Foundation with their anti-consumer practices over the last few years. They’ve sold out to corporate interests and don’t give a shit about the educational/hobbyist mission of the original Raspberry Pi.
For $100 you can buy a micro form factor Optiplex PC which has several orders of magnitude more computing power, but it does have a bit larger form factor and less ports than what OP listed.
That’s too bad because the specs OP listed are pretty great plus I’d love to see the Raspberry Pi Foundation (or whichever corporate entity controls production and sales) knocked down a few pegs due to their anti-consumer behavior over the last several years.
Another alternative is to setup a backup server at a willing friend/family members house so that you can physically take the drive and just upload any new changes later.
But with Intel changing their socket every couple generations, you’re talking about a new motherboard too if you want to upgrade.
What’s the storage capacity on this motherboard? I know with their office PCs, you only get 2 SATA ports and typically only a single PCIE slot so you’re forced to choose between a GPU or LSI SAS card. I have a huge media library so this was one of my primary concerns when I specced mine out years ago. Also consider 3.5" drive capacity. Are you limited to just two HDDs?
Wow it didn’t even click in my head that this is a 6th gen Core. How is OP speccing out a custom server using 8 year old parts?
On the other hand, they’re relatively cheap and it gives you a spare to tinker with, or at least that’s what I told myself last week when I ordered another Pi3 since I saw they came back in stock on Digikey after all these years.
The ratgdo seems to do everything MyQ did but locally. What’s the issue?
The hard part is the hardware as you should really remove the battery from the equation to prevent catastrophic damage from constantly draining and charging an old worn-out battery. Unfortunately most older phones won’t run off wall power without a battery inside so one method is to solder some wires attached to ~4V to the battery contacts in the phone to trick it into thinking there is a battery present and allow you to run the device off USB power directly. This method might vary from phone to phone.
That was just an example of when you might need to transcode multiple streams at once. Typically you shouldn’t need to transcode anything especially if you’re just watching at home. In that case you can have dozens of streams in any resolution running at once without the computer sweating at all.
The power is only needed for transcoding. Multiple 4k streams should be little more than directly serving up the files to the client machine (like your TV) which consumes very few resources. You should avoid transcoding 4k down to 1080p or 720p by either avoiding 4k content, grabbing only stuff that is directly compatible, or having duplicate copies of stuff in 4k and 1080p so that the 1080p file gets transcoded if needed.
Many of us have separate 4k libraries on our servers to prevent any possibility of transcoding it (like for remote streams when you don’t have the upload speed to stream 4k directly). Like for example i have about a dozen family members using my server remotely but I don’t share my 4k libraries with them since the best upload I can get with Comcast is 12Mbps. In the Plex settings I have everyone limited to 3-4Mbps so that I can handle 3-4 people watching remotely at once which leads to these streams getting transcoded down to 720p.
R7 gang here. Let us keep the dream alive!