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Kajiimagi

Kajiimagi

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Anyone have experience good or bad with Seagate IronWolf NAS drives? I have a 10TB drive I bought in 2018 that was made by HGST but not seeing it on Newegg (just pricing out) and the 12TB Seagate seems the best bang/buck. I had one of their hybrid drives in a playstation but that's about it for that brand.
 
Denamian

Denamian

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Kajiimagi said:
Anyone have experience good or bad with Seagate IronWolf NAS drives? I have a 10TB drive I bought in 2018 that was made by HGST but not seeing it on Newegg (just pricing out) and the 12TB Seagate seems the best bang/buck. I had one of their hybrid drives in a playstation but that's about it for that brand.
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My current NAS is a DS1821+ with 16TB Ironwolf drives and it replaced a QNAP TS-251 that had 8TB Ironwolf drives. I started with 4TB HGST drives in the QNAP, and the only issue I ever had with them was that they were noticeably louder. From a performance and reliability standpoint, I've had no problems with them.
 
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Kajiimagi

Kajiimagi

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Been doing a lot of reading on a NAS. Then I finally read the user manual on a NVIDIA Shield I've been looking at. It sure seems like it will do everything I need to replace what I was using. It will be here Tuesday to see for sure. May not need to drop 2-3K after all. Shield was $199 , stand was $10. That's cheaper than one NAS drive.
 
Kithani

Kithani

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Kajiimagi said:
Been doing a lot of reading on a NAS. Then I finally read the user manual on a NVIDIA Shield I've been looking at. It sure seems like it will do everything I need to replace what I was using. It will be here Tuesday to see for sure. May not need to drop 2-3K after all. Shield was $199 , stand was $10. That's cheaper than one NAS drive.
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I currently use a shield with a single 6 TB drive attached and it runs PLEX pretty well but obviously I’m limited by size I guess. We don’t watch a ton of TV so I’m not needing to download the latest episode of each show etc.
 
Kajiimagi

Kajiimagi

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Kithani said:
I currently use a shield with a single 6 TB drive attached and it runs PLEX pretty well but obviously I’m limited by size I guess. We don’t watch a ton of TV so I’m not needing to download the latest episode of each show etc.
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My old half ass system was my old router with a 10tb drive attached. It still has 2+tb free so I'm going to keep using it. Only thing concerns me is it's formatted as NTFS. The manual for the shield says it cannot access NTFS folders, but the website says it can? Guess I'll see Tuesday when I get it set up. I need to be able to write to the drive over my home network to make what I want to do work. Worst case I back up my backup and reformat it. Still a LOT cheaper than buying / building a NAS.
 
V

velk

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Kajiimagi said:
Anyone have experience good or bad with Seagate IronWolf NAS drives? I have a 10TB drive I bought in 2018 that was made by HGST but not seeing it on Newegg (just pricing out) and the 12TB Seagate seems the best bang/buck. I had one of their hybrid drives in a playstation but that's about it for that brand.
Click to expand...

I've found the 10TB ones to be pretty unreliable. I built a 12 bay with 3TB drives, and I've been upgrading them to 10TB ones as they failed - so far 4 of the 3TB ones have failed and 5 of the replacement 10TB ones have failed.
 
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Void

Void

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Kajiimagi said:
My old half ass system was my old router with a 10tb drive attached. It still has 2+tb free so I'm going to keep using it. Only thing concerns me is it's formatted as NTFS. The manual for the shield says it cannot access NTFS folders, but the website says it can? Guess I'll see Tuesday when I get it set up. I need to be able to write to the drive over my home network to make what I want to do work. Worst case I back up my backup and reformat it. Still a LOT cheaper than buying / building a NAS.
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First, your question about Synology approved drives. That is mostly not a concern, but you will have to click past the "are you sure you want to use this horrible drive?!" prompts. Also, it covers things like where I said I needed to clip off a little nub to make it fit in the drive bay. They aren't going to approve a drive that has everything perfect except you clipping off a nub on their bay, so drives can fail their certification for reasons like that. I wouldn't worry about it.

As far as the Shield, it can run directly from shared drives on your network if you want, like that old computer you said you had sitting around. Currently I have all my movies and TV shows on the Synology NAS, but all of my music is stored directly on an old computer because it syncs via Dropbox with my other devices. Kodi on the Shield sees all my music just fine, and if it were movies instead there would be no issue.

And I can assure you that the drives on my old computer are not formatted FAT32, so NTFS works just fine. I forget because it has been so long, but I think I'm connecting via SMB? I think, but don't quote me on this, that the "no NTFS" thing is strictly for USB drives connected directly to the Shield. But even that may be wrong or obsolete.
 
Arative

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If you get the shield pro version you can run a Plex server directly from that with a USB attached drive.

You can't go wrong with the shield. It's a great little device from the price. I have 5 of them. I'd wish Nvidia would update the hardware and release a new version but it runs just fine as is.
 
Kajiimagi

Kajiimagi

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Yes it's the pro version. I'm also going to get a larger HDD than the 10TB I have now and back everything to it from all my sources. If I cannot make what I want to do work with the shield direct, I'm going to nuke the PC under my desk and set it up as a NAS with FreeNAS as/is.
I've messed with Plex, but to me Kodi is more straight forward. And I can give my remote to my wife and she can watch TV without asking 100 questions.
It will be here tomorrow.
 
Rabbit_Games

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Nvidia Shield is great if you like all the extra stuff. I need to get/build something that just runs Netflix for the wife, and Kodi/Plex. That's literally all we use it for.
 
Arative

Arative

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Kajiimagi said:
Yes it's the pro version. I'm also going to get a larger HDD than the 10TB I have now and back everything to it from all my sources. If I cannot make what I want to do work with the shield direct, I'm going to nuke the PC under my desk and set it up as a NAS with FreeNAS as/is.
I've messed with Plex, but to me Kodi is more straight forward. And I can give my remote to my wife and she can watch TV without asking 100 questions.
It will be here tomorrow.
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I prefer Kodi too. I use Plex though for family so they can stream my stuff.
 
Kajiimagi

Kajiimagi

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Looked at HDD's with and without enclosures. WD 20TB drive w/o enclosure is $100 more than WD's Elements brand with the enclosure. I guess WD think's they can make their money back with monitoring or cloud storage or someshit? Anyhow I ordered the one with enclosure and it will be here Saturday.
I have a POS prebuild china special , I think it's brand is ACEPC , sllllloooooooooooowwww ass thing that chugs at 4k. I'm looking forward to introducing it to the sledgehammer after I have the new system up and running and everything erased off of it. I'll even post a pic!
 
Void

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I use Kodi as well for my own viewing, as Plex is just shit compared to it. Plex is for friends/relatives that just think it is magic that I give them movies.

I will say that I am pretty leery of anyone that actually runs Plex from something like the Shield or a NAS and intends to use it for themselves and others at the same time. I can't imagine watching something in 4K on Kodi at home while someone else is watching something via Plex that requires transcoding. Even a fairly recent computer is likely to chug a bit at that, I'd think. So whenever they advertise that they can run Plex, I figure that's technically true, but only if you are literally only allowing one viewer at a time. Maybe I'm wrong and others do it no problem, but I'm skeptical enough to not even bother trying it. I'd love to be proven wrong.
 
C

Captain Suave

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Welp, against recommendations I recently installed TrueNAS Scale on a USB drive. This used to be the preferred method for FreeNAS, and I'd been doing so successfully on TrueNAS Core for years without issue. This time, the stick failed in about two months. RIP.

Fortunately, I had all my plugins stored on a secondary SSD and it's a relatively trivial matter to get another small SSD boot disk and link it to the old data.
 
C

Captain Suave

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Void said:
I use Kodi as well for my own viewing, as Plex is just shit compared to it. Plex is for friends/relatives that just think it is magic that I give them movies.

I will say that I am pretty leery of anyone that actually runs Plex from something like the Shield or a NAS and intends to use it for themselves and others at the same time. I can't imagine watching something in 4K on Kodi at home while someone else is watching something via Plex that requires transcoding. Even a fairly recent computer is likely to chug a bit at that, I'd think. So whenever they advertise that they can run Plex, I figure that's technically true, but only if you are literally only allowing one viewer at a time. Maybe I'm wrong and others do it no problem, but I'm skeptical enough to not even bother trying it. I'd love to be proven wrong.
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I run Plex, but even with a 65'' TV at my couch's viewing distance of 12 ft 1080p is all my eyes can resolve anyway. My 9 year old homebrew server can transcode two streams simultaneously, which is the most I ever have going. I don't even bother downloading 4k content.
 
Denamian

Denamian

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Void said:
I use Kodi as well for my own viewing, as Plex is just shit compared to it. Plex is for friends/relatives that just think it is magic that I give them movies.

I will say that I am pretty leery of anyone that actually runs Plex from something like the Shield or a NAS and intends to use it for themselves and others at the same time. I can't imagine watching something in 4K on Kodi at home while someone else is watching something via Plex that requires transcoding. Even a fairly recent computer is likely to chug a bit at that, I'd think. So whenever they advertise that they can run Plex, I figure that's technically true, but only if you are literally only allowing one viewer at a time. Maybe I'm wrong and others do it no problem, but I'm skeptical enough to not even bother trying it. I'd love to be proven wrong.
Click to expand...

Plex supports Intel Quicksync for hardware transcoding, so Intel CPUs can handle more transcoding than you might think. I run my Plex server on a 10th gen NUC and while playing 4k locally it is still held back by my pathetic 10 mbps upload speed.
 
Void

Void

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Denamian said:
Plex supports Intel Quicksync for hardware transcoding, so Intel CPUs can handle more transcoding than you might think. I run my Plex server on a 10th gen NUC and while playing 4k locally it is still held back by my pathetic 10 mbps upload speed.
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First, unless something has changed, hardware transcoding is only available for the paid version of Plex these days (it was free years ago). I do pay for it now, and intend to take advantage of the yearly holiday discount to buy a lifetime subscription, assuming they do it this year like all the others.

Second, I agree with you. But the Shield and my NAS don't have Intel cpus, which is why I said that I wouldn't be too confident of them running heavy duty Plex stuff. Maybe newer NAS have different cpus, but they used to have ARM or something like that I believe.
 
Denamian

Denamian

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Void said:
First, unless something has changed, hardware transcoding is only available for the paid version of Plex these days (it was free years ago). I do pay for it now, and intend to take advantage of the yearly holiday discount to buy a lifetime subscription, assuming they do it this year like all the others.

Second, I agree with you. But the Shield and my NAS don't have Intel cpus, which is why I said that I wouldn't be too confident of them running heavy duty Plex stuff. Maybe newer NAS have different cpus, but they used to have ARM or something like that I believe.
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My QNAP TS-251 has a an old Celeron j1900 that does quicksync and that CPU came out in 2013, so I'd assume any newer NAS with an Intel CPU should support it. I did forget about it being a Plex Pass only feature. I bought a lifetime license for $75 eons ago.
 
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