Current setup is PMS running on a Synology 5-bay, and another PMS running on a Shield Pro. The NAS server is primarily used for remote streaming, while the Shield serves to my home LAN (AppleTVs mainly).

I’ve been seeing stuttering on larger files, either using the Plex app or Infuse, and I’m fairly certain the Synology is the weak link. Network performance in the house has pretty solid, though admittedly I could stand to test it more thoroughly. I’ve been looking at moving my library to a standalone system. I’ve been looking at the Beelink ME Mini (which happens to be on sale!). What I don’t know is the best way to build this out.

I don’t want to have to buy all 6 SSDs (ar at least 6x4TB ones!) at once, so I’d be looking at either a stock Linux (Ubuntu or Rocky) install w/ I guess a BTRFS pool for the SSDs (I’m guessing I can use the eMMC for OS depending on how big the install is - that or use the SSD in slot 4). Alternatively, i could possibly set up TruNAS w/ the Plex pp to manage the storage.

As for populating the media, I plan to keep the Synology as the central repo of my data. I have it replicating to another NAS at my dad’s house, with movies/music/tv replicating using Syncthing. I plan to also use Syncthing to populate the Beelink.

Anyway, please poke holes in this plan and/or suggest a better one. My main goals are to get the media I’m streaming off spinning disk w/ minimal power draw (didn’t mention that above) in a way that I can expand storage as necessary to accommodate the media library. Nothing’s purchased yet, so I’m not married to the hardware. I would ideally like to convert the library to h.265 or even AV1 if I can make it work.

ETA: For clarity: I’m not transcoding AFAIK. My Shield mounts the Synology over SMB and mostly works fine, until I try to play anything 4k - then I get stuttering. On the surface, this sounded like a network issue, but I can’t find a problem w/ the LAN. My thought was to move the PMS to a single location w/ local storage, and use the Synology just as an archive.

ETA2: FWIW, I have not expanded the memory on the Synology or installed any cache drives.

  • FreedomAdvocateEnglish
    1·
    22 hours ago

    What issues are you having with it? I just did this and have found it to be pretty much perfect.

    • noim@feddit.orgEnglish
      3·
      11 hours ago

      What issues are you having with it? I just did this and have found it to be pretty much perfect.

      1. The lack of something like mergerfs. It is okay for plex, because you can add each drive, but not for all softwares. There is unionfs with macfuse, but it is very buggy. Maybe the new fskit backend will improve over time, but not today. I had to modify some docker containers to install and run mergerfs inside of the container.
      2. Docker. You can use orbstack or docker desktop. But both work the same. They create an internal vm with linux and run docker there. This means no gpu acceleration and worse performance in general. So no gpu / ai hardware acceleration in softwares like immich. And I have some softwares running in orbstack and some native on the host (softwares like plex for hardware transcoding). But I would prefer to run all in containers. Maybe the new container software by apple will solve this, but it is at early stages. Far from finish.
      3. Because a mac mini is not standard, there is no way to power control it. I bought a jetkvm, but of course I can’t use the atx adapter to control the power state. This is all fine until macos locks up when you are abroad. 3.1 You need display access to unlock filevault
      4. In macos there is no way to tell why a hdd woke up from sleep. You can’t find the culprit who wakes up your hdds all the time. Pretty annoying.
      5. The smb implementation on macos is shit. And I know for a fact, I am not alone with this opinion.
      6. Macos permission prompts. Not nice if you don’t know why your softwares has no network access, because you opened it via ssh but on the desktop there is a local network permission prompt.
      7. Hardware is expensive. I don’t mean the mac mini itself. I mean thunderbolt accessories.
      8. Launchctl sucks

      But there are also some good things:

      1. Power usage is great
      2. The transcoding power is insane. 100Mbit 4k movie? No problem. My 1650 ti I used in the past struggled with it.