Question NUC as a Plex transcoding and simple backup solution - possible?

[PiffPuff]

Hi guys,

the initial idea was to buy NAS, because it supports SATA III SSDs, which are cheap. However, NAS CPUs and GPUs are pretty average and NAS with more or less decent hardware costs EUR/$ 520-580, e.g. QNAP TS-264-8G or Asustor Lockerstor 2 Gen2 AS6702T. Price for disks will be added on top.

Fast transcoding in Plex Media Server is of high priority to me, so I studied MiniPCs, which have much more powerful hardware than any NAS. Of course, I only considered those Intel CPUs that support Quick Sync (hardware encoding acceleration).

I liked these Intel NUC models: NUC10i3FNH and NUC11TNHi3 (and here is their side-by-side comparison). However, they only support either M.2 or 2.5" drives, which limits me in storage volume, as these disks are more expensive than SATA III.

Both NUCs support at least 2 internal drives (NUC11 supports 3). I'm not sure whether these could be 2x2.5" or only 1x2.5" + 1xM.2, so I calculated the end price of these NUCs with 1x2.5" 2Tb + 1xM.2 2Tb disks and 8Gb RAM to compare this budget with NAS devices mentioned above.

It turns out that NUC with 4Tb of storage on board will cost me EUR 300/350 (NUC10/NUC11, barebone) + EUR 260 (disks) + EUR 25 (DDR4-2666 for NUC10 / DDR4-3200 for NUC11) = EUR 585-635

QNAP (8Gb RAM) with 4Tb HDD will cost me EUR 677
Asustor (4Gb RAM) with the same HDD + 4Gb RAM will cost me EUR 666 😈

I'm a bit at a loss what to do. On the one hand, if any of NUCs supports 2xM.2 cards (does it?), the end price of the unit will drop by EUR 40 (each M.2 storage costs EUR 20 less than a 2.5" disk). I can even buy a slightly cheaper MiniPC instead of NUC (e.g., for EUR 250), which CPU/GPU will still be better than those in NAS. So MiniPC solution may cost me EUR 500 finally. I get fast transcoding for 4K movie with almost any bitrate, but I only have 4Tb of storage, which is ~100 movies. Or 70 movies + backup of photos from my mobile. That's OK, and maybe prices for M.2/2.5" storage will drop and I will replace 2x2Tb drives with 2x4Tb in the next 2-3 years. I plan to run this system on Windows or Windows Server (is that ok?).

On the other hand, NAS will cost me EUR 170 more (670-500), and will have much less transcoding capabilities. Choosing a cheaper NAS will limit them even more. However, any NAS runs OS, which is very focused on backup/storage activities. While storage is not my priority #1, I hope Windows apps are capable of performing automated/scheduled backup operations on a decent level.

With all the above considered - what will you recommend? [No DIY NAS advices, please - don't want to go that way]

Thank you!

 

[punkncat]

In a similar situation, a buddy of mine uses a NUC alongside some inexpensive external drives for the Plex library to reside on. It seems to work pretty well in his specific use case. I run Plex from an HTPC type build which also serves as a gaming platform and the power of that rig makes simple work of Plex service.

 

[PiffPuff]

Thank you!

If I choose NUC, my biggest/main storage will be the external 3.5" drive in this self-powered case. With that in mind, may I ask you to kindly clarify the following:

1. Does it make sense to also have 2 internal drives, where 1 will be dedicated to system and apps, while the 2nd will handle app cache (incl. Plex cache), new downloads, etc. I will watch movies with my Shield from the 2nd drive, and those I decided to keep I'd move to the external one. In other words, shall physical separation of system/apps from downloads/cache/temp. storage bring significant benefits, or will it rather be minor difference (e.g., 3-5% faster read/write, which I won't even notice)? If it makes sense, which drive (M.2 or SSD) should I use for system and which for cache/temp storage?
2. I know USB-connected drives are not friendly with neither BTRFS, nor Unraid or ZFS. [and honestly I am only familiar with Windows, and also Plex can perfectly run under it.] However, while I sacrificed NAS capabilities in favor of NUC, hence I can't secure solid backup on the file system level, I still want to have some sort of secure backup solution. For example, I can have part of my data be synchronized between the 2nd (= internal) drive and the 3rd (= external) drive. Are there any Windows tools (system ones or standalone apps) to do that in a quality way? I can't fully mirror those drives (as the internal drive will have less size than the external one - to save costs), but maybe I can "reserve" 0.5-0.7Tb from each of those drives to be used as 100% copies of each other? Maybe there are much better solutions, and I will gladly listen about them. The key idea is simple: 1) make the internal drive(s) work fast in daily operations, and 2) have some small (<1Tb) but elegant and automated backup solution - either between one of internal and the external drive, or between 2 internal drives themselves.
3. Is there any benefit of running Windows Server in my case instead of Windows 10/11?

Thank you!

 

[WhoGotMyLighter]

Hey there, I know this is kind of old, but I'm in about the same boat as you.

I was thinking of going with a raid hard drive enclosure externally with a nuc. So that I have the redundant backup and security.

Can you tell me what you finally decided on and how you like it?

I would appreciate the feedback! 🙂

 

[USAFRet]

I was thinking of going with a raid hard drive enclosure externally with a nuc. So that I have the redundant backup and security.

RAID is not a backup or security.

It can only protect against physical drive fail.
It does nothing for all the other forms of data loss.

 

[WhoGotMyLighter]

RAID is not a backup or security.

It can only protect against physical drive fail.
It does nothing for all the other forms of data loss.

I guess ensuring a drive failure doesn't lead to loss of data isn't a backup per day. My apologies for mis phrasing.

I'm looking to make sure if I lose a drive I don't lose my data by setting up a raid and using a mic as my primary server for Plex.

Hopefully that clears up any confusion.

I'd still like to know what the OP decided on and how it's working for them since as I said we are in a similar boat, I don't want a full blown nas since the hardware isn't as strong as what I can get in a PC for the same price.

 

[USAFRet]

I guess ensuring a drive failure doesn't lead to loss of data isn't a backup per day. My apologies for mis phrasing.

I'm looking to make sure if I lose a drive I don't lose my data by setting up a raid and using a mic as my primary server for Plex.

Hopefully that clears up any confusion.

I'd still like to know what the OP decided on and how it's working for them since as I said we are in a similar boat, I don't want a full blown nas since the hardware isn't as strong as what I can get in a PC for the same price.

A physical drive fail is but one of the pathways to data loss.
Yes, a RAID 1 or higher protects against that, mostly.

But, that is only useful if you really need that continued uptime.
For instance, if you were running a webstore, and downtime == lost sales.
It allows the system to limp along until you can swap in a new drive and allow the array to rebuild.

Any semi competent host will also have a real backup situation.
Accidental deletion, ransomware, corruption...RAID does nothing for that.

And if you can suffer through a couple of hours to recover, a good backup routine is all you need.
This covers all the above fail modes, plus a physically dead drive.

 

[WhoGotMyLighter]

A physical drive fail is but one of the pathways to data loss.
Yes, a RAID 1 or higher protects against that, mostly.

But, that is only useful if you really need that continued uptime.
For instance, if you were running a webstore, and downtime == lost sales.
It allows the system to limp along until you can swap in a new drive and allow the array to rebuild.

Any semi competent host will also have a real backup situation.
Accidental deletion, ransomware, corruption...RAID does nothing for that.

And if you can suffer through a couple of hours to recover, a good backup routine is all you need.
This covers all the above fail modes, plus a physically dead drive.

You are right, but most people that are simply backing up tv shows and movies and media and are generally follow good practices online/email/etc won't be hit with ransomware and need a backup off site.

We are talking plex media server here as the main server system that means the data in question will be movies/TV shows/music with some possible photos and home movies.

So while you are right still and again, that's going to an extreme imo for these types of data. When I said what I said I meant of tv shows and movies. Not of critical docs or family photos or someone's will, not anything of high importance. I don't want to lose married with children for example but I'm sure it's our there somewhere I can get again.

This is not going to be a hosted website (most likely lol) this is t goi g to hold my vast fortune in Bitcoin, it's going to hold media I like and will have fond memories of.

Not sure how we ended up so far off track from the main point of my reviving a slightly old thread but I apologize of it's my fault.

I just wanted to know what the OP ended up going with.

 

[USAFRet]

You are right, but most people that are simply backing up tv shows and movies and media and are generally follow good practices online/email/etc won't be hit with ransomware and need a backup off site.

hahahahahaha
No.

I'm just trying to dispel the thought process that a RAID array is a good and only data protection concept.

 

[WhoGotMyLighter]

hahahahahaha
No.

I'm just trying to dispel the thought process that a RAID array is a good and only data protection concept.

I haven't once tried to argue that your wrong just that maybe this isn't the right place for the argument since most of the time plex is media not critical things (docs, sales as you had mentioned earlier, etc)

I totally believe in the 3,2,1 backup plan where it fits, as I said a will for example. It doesn't fit with married with children for example, or Archer, or any TV show/movie.

So not to be rude but again, I'm here for the OP and what they had bought and their experience so that I can make a more informed decision about my next purchase.

I'm not here to agree with you about proper backing up strategy of 321 or what is technically a back up or not.

So let's not hijack his thread anymore than it already was shall we?

 

[USAFRet]

So let's not hijack his thread anymore than it already was shall we?

Deal.

 

[PiffPuff]

Hey @WhoGotMyLighter and here I finally am - in a Superman's suit and ready to help!

Firstly - I haven't bought anything yet, but this shouldn't be a deal-breaker for you, as I just temporarily put the whole HomeTheater stuff on hold for financial reasons. Still gonna buy it and NUC will be my choice.

What should be yours depends mainly on your answers on those 2 questions:

1) I want to have Plex Server + what?
2) How much data I need to back up?

My answer on the first question was "a decent home office PC with simple backup capabilities for non-critical data" and NUC (or any other small form factor/SFF PC, aka miniPC) will work perfectly fine for that, as there are dozens of apps, which allow you to move data between HDD/SSDs and automatically backup your smartphone data (like photos) on connection, etc. So a simple backup for a non-techie with easy setup and no multi-level protection against cases described above by @USAFRet . Hence - suitable for non-critical data only. In my case I rather use NUC as the 2nd line of backup solution, so it does store the crtitical stuff, but it is firstly backed up to the cloud (10Gb free of charge). In other words NUC is not the primary backup solution for me.

My answer on the second question was "up to 4Tb", which is not much for a real media collection, specifically in 4K, so NUC will be fine. This is just the way I watch movies/series - I save only what really touched me, so my collection is about 7 series and maybe 50 movies. If yours is (or will be) bigger, keep in mind that the internal storage design of NUCs is like "1 SSD + 1M.2" (AFAIK, some NUCs have 2 SSDs, but this is rather an exception). While you can perfectly live with that from the storage stanpoint (e.g., 4Tb SSD + 2Tb M.2 could be OK for you), this is not a good design for a backup solution. You can of course setup data backups from SSD to M.2, but you will cut your storage space /2 in this case, since each disk will duplicate each other. Besides, you mentioned RAID and while I'm quite a noob in these architectures, I know that RAID is more than just 2 disks mirroring each other, there's more than that in it, and Windows is not so much supposed to build RAID solutions on. This part of explanation may sound clumsy, but what I'm saying is semi-professional out-of-the-box backup solution works better oт NASs rather than PCs.
However, if you plan to keep only those movies that you watch "on this week/month" on internal NUC storage and keep the biggest part of your colleciton on external big HDD(s), that could be a good solution for you. You can buy an external HDD storage for a couple of disks (like this or this - it has RAID capabilities) and connect it to your NUC. With that you will have NUC's power (CPU/GPU) and NAS's storage volume, but the backup to be set up by yourself using one of many apps that exist for that.

Long story short:
- go for NUC if you have multiple PLEX transcoding flows at a time (e.g., wife watches series on her iPad, kids watch cartoons on mobiles, etc.) + you want to have a machine for office tasks + you don't need RAID, but rather a simple backup solution
- go for NAS if your PLEX doesn't have more than 1 transcoding task at a time + you need RAID backup + you can spend some time to study new OS (which is not a rocket science, but still it's a new OS, right?)

Hope that helped.

 

[WhoGotMyLighter]

Hey @WhoGotMyLighter and here I finally am - in a Superman's suit and ready to help!

Firstly - I haven't bought anything yet, but this shouldn't be a deal-breaker for you, as I just temporarily put the whole HomeTheater stuff on hold for financial reasons. Still gonna buy it and NUC will be my choice.

What should be yours depends mainly on your answers on those 2 questions:

1) I want to have Plex Server + what?
2) How much data I need to back up?

My answer on the first question was "a decent home office PC with simple backup capabilities for non-critical data" and NUC (or any other small form factor/SFF PC, aka miniPC) will work perfectly fine for that, as there are dozens of apps, which allow you to move data between HDD/SSDs and automatically backup your smartphone data (like photos) on connection, etc. So a simple backup for a non-techie with easy setup and no multi-level protection against cases described above by @USAFRet . Hence - suitable for non-critical data only. In my case I rather use NUC as the 2nd line of backup solution, so it does store the crtitical stuff, but it is firstly backed up to the cloud (10Gb free of charge). In other words NUC is not the primary backup solution for me.

My answer on the second question was "up to 4Tb", which is not much for a real media collection, specifically in 4K, so NUC will be fine. This is just the way I watch movies/series - I save only what really touched me, so my collection is about 7 series and maybe 50 movies. If yours is (or will be) bigger, keep in mind that the internal storage design of NUCs is like "1 SSD + 1M.2" (AFAIK, some NUCs have 2 SSDs, but this is rather an exception). While you can perfectly live with that from the storage stanpoint (e.g., 4Tb SSD + 2Tb M.2 could be OK for you), this is not a good design for a backup solution. You can of course setup data backups from SSD to M.2, but you will cut your storage space /2 in this case, since each disk will duplicate each other. Besides, you mentioned RAID and while I'm quite a noob in these architectures, I know that RAID is more than just 2 disks mirroring each other, there's more than that in it, and Windows is not so much supposed to build RAID solutions on. This part of explanation may sound clumsy, but what I'm saying is semi-professional out-of-the-box backup solution works better oт NASs rather than PCs.
However, if you plan to keep only those movies that you watch "on this week/month" on internal NUC storage and keep the biggest part of your colleciton on external big HDD(s), that could be a good solution for you. You can buy an external HDD storage for a couple of disks (like this or this - it has RAID capabilities) and connect it to your NUC. With that you will have NUC's power (CPU/GPU) and NAS's storage volume, but the backup to be set up by yourself using one of many apps that exist for that.

Long story short:
- go for NUC if you have multiple PLEX transcoding flows at a time (e.g., wife watches series on her iPad, kids watch cartoons on mobiles, etc.) + you want to have a machine for office tasks + you don't need RAID, but rather a simple backup solution
- go for NAS if your PLEX doesn't have more than 1 transcoding task at a time + you need RAID backup + you can spend some time to study new OS (which is not a rocket science, but still it's a new OS, right?)

Hope that helped.

Very detailed and I see through your disguise! Your Clark Kent! 🙂

So I am going to go a little overkill on my set up I think.

First I am getting a hard drive enclosure that supports raid (you can do it with 2 hard drives, 1 can fail and no data loss, it's raid 5 if I recall right, I'm still learning the numbers.

I'm going to use that for now with the 10yr old PC I have running plex right now. This will allow me to get the files off the 10 yr old hard drives and somewhere safer to start

I'll eventually add 2 more drives (since I can hold 4) but for now I don't even use a full 2tb (I've been very careful about what I keep lol).

My movie collection is quite extensive, I have started to widdle away the ones that don't need to be saved, or are of low quality that I one and done with, but tv shows I have a hand full and MWC for example is 10 seasons lol it's a biggy.

During this time I can play with what others have said to use called unraid. This will also give me time to look at hardware options, such as building my own or just getting a nuc. For now as I said there aren't many people using my server but you never know, so I do always try to look ahead for potential bottlenecks.

For me, there isn't much on that computer of great importance. Most of my important docs are already in the cloud, and the ones that aren't for example are tax returns which I can upload when I do it yearly.

Anything of major importance has the 321 rule which isn't much since most things are online now a days anyway it's already backed up somewhere.

Maybe the hard drive enclosure idea can help you? It's cut my price down over 1/2, and I may have to put it on pause for financial reasons but with it being cut in 1/2 I think it won't be long if at all.

 

[USAFRet]

First I am getting a hard drive enclosure that supports raid (you can do it with 2 hard drives, 1 can fail and no data loss, it's raid 5 if I recall right, I'm still learning the numbers.

RAID 5 requires at least 3 physical drives.
At the expense of the size of one of them.

3x 4TB + RAID 5 = 8TB usabe drive space.

RAID 1 requires only 2.

2x 4TB + RAID 1 = 4TB usable drive space.

 

[WhoGotMyLighter]

RAID 5 requires at least 3 physical drives.
At the expense of the size of one of them.

3x 4TB + RAID 5 = 8TB usabe drive space.

RAID 1 requires only 2.

2x 4TB + RAID 1 = 4TB usable drive space.

Thanks for the clarification!

The 2 drive raid is my main plan, I remember something about 10 being 1+0.

I'm looking to have 2 ones (4 drive total) 1 for movies and 1 TV shows/misc things, family photos, etc.

Unless it's a better idea to jbod 2 drives and raid 1 the 1 big drive? (I think I phrased that right)

 

[USAFRet]

Thanks for the clarification!

The 2 drive raid is my main plan, I remember something about 10 being 1+0.

I'm looking to have 2 ones (4 drive total) 1 for movies and 1 TV shows/misc things, family photos, etc.

Unless it's a better idea to jbod 2 drives and raid 1 the 1 big drive? (I think I phrased that right)

At the risk of going off topic...whatever RAID array type you choose also needs a real backup.
The RAID only provides protection against physical drive fail.
If you accidentally delete something, or format the wrong volume...poof, all gone.

 

[WhoGotMyLighter]

At the risk of going off topic...whatever RAID array type you choose also needs a real backup.
The RAID only provides protection against physical drive fail.
If you accidentally delete something, or format the wrong volume...poof, all gone.

I won't stray and hijack the thread (or let it happen) however I say I'm not worried about backing my media with the 321, and over the last 10 years if I deleted a show I wanted I got it again, it wasn't a huge deal.

The family photos sure we can agree we need a 2nd back up method, that would tbe cloud where I keep my important documents.

Edit stay to be stray

 

[USAFRet]

I won't stray and hijack the thread (or let it happen) however I say I'm not worried about backing my media with the 321, and over the last 10 years if I deleted a show I wanted I got it again, it wasn't a huge deal.

The family photos sure we can agree we need a 2nd back up method, that would tbe cloud where I keep my important documents.

Edit stay to be stray

Exactly.

Stuff you can lose....oh well.
Stuff you absolutely cannot lose? Backup other than a RAID array.