I've been running a HP proliant G7 DL165 server for many years mostly with Unrain on it and although it's been used for my things its main day to day use has been as a Plex server for friends and family.
Its common that i get 3 or 4 people streaming at a time and truth be told the server has been struggling for some time.
Years back films would be small files and as quality got better the files are bigger and a few people log in using Playstations with cause the server to transcode the video most of the time the fans spin up and it sounds like an helicopter is in the house (some on here will relate lol)

So my question is what do i replace it with.
I was looking at the Synology stuff but that would mean moving away from Unraid and re formatting the 4HDD i have in my current setup.

I'm a little out of touch with how NAS servers have progressed, what are peoples recommendations these days for a 4-6 bay NAS with good Unraid performance.

If willing to build your own, lots of info in this section: https://forums.unraid.net/forum/9-hardware/

So much better that buying a prebuilt I think.

uGreen DXP4800 Pro would be my choice.

16 hours ago, Led57 said:

uGreen DXP4800 Pro would be my choice.

I was looking at the 6-Bay UGREEN NASync DXP6800 Pro
But reading up i wasn't sure if it would work with Unraid.

The main problem with Synology boxes is their backup is the same as your storage.
So if like me you have 32 TB of data it take 32TB to back up. With Unraid i just have a 12TB parity set for month back ups and forget about it, i love that about Unraid.

I do like their smaller low wattage boxes that run quietly though. My current server can be heard all over the house when its serving data its so noisy, i was thinking about moving it to the garage.
Maybe UGreen or Terramaster have the low power and noise with the Unraid benefit.

2 hours ago, Barnoe said:

So if like me you have 32 TB of data it take 32TB to back up. With Unraid i just have a 12TB parity set for month back ups and forget about it, i love that about Unraid.

Parity is not a backup.

Parity is a useful function to allow reconstruction/replacement of a failed drive while providing some HA (High Availability) of the server during array repair. But a proper backup is the only thing that will truly prevent data loss.

On 7/5/2026 at 7:03 AM, Barnoe said:

Years back films would be small files and as quality got better the files are bigger and a few people log in using Playstations with cause the server to transcode the video most of the time the fans spin up and it sounds like an helicopter is in the house (some on here will relate lol)

How are your transcoding? I would think that Plex could use a GPU to do the transcoding much more efficiently... (Point of Disclosure– I do not use Plex. I use Unraid to store my media and KODI clients to play content. In this case, the client does any transcoding necessary. I use a mysql Docker to maintain a common database that all of the KODI clients use.)

1 hour ago, Frank1940 said:

How are your transcoding? I would think that Plex could use a GPU to do the transcoding much more efficiently... (Point of Disclosure– I do not use Plex. I use Unraid to store my media and KODI clients to play content. In this case, the client does any transcoding necessary. I use a mysql Docker to maintain a common database that all of the KODI clients use.)

Transcoding is done on an SSD, a GPU would definitely make a difference as it would if i converted something using Handbrake.
The HP server is old tech now and i need an upgrade anyway so maybe something with a GPU could be considered.

2 hours ago, ConnerVT said:

Parity is not a backup.

Parity is a useful function to allow reconstruction/replacement of a failed drive while providing some HA (High Availability) of the server during array repair. But a proper backup is the only thing that will truly prevent data loss.

Well the only time i would need to make use of a backup is, if one of my drives failed.
touch wood this has never happened yet, probably because the Seagate Ironwolf drives i use have been replaced over time as i needed more capacity 4TB to 8TB to 12TB.
Each time as i slotted in the bigger drive the parity did its thing and rebuilt the data perfectly.

So works for my needs.

Admittedly in the case of an accidental deletion, it wouldn't help if i only noticed after a parity check.

If you do move ahead with a new server, consider retaining that old box as a backup server for the main server.

Remember that there are a lot of ways to lose data other than a drive failure– Fire, flood, lightening, theft of equipment, Malware, malicious behavior of a user, power supply malfunction are a few that quickly come to mind.

27 minutes ago, Barnoe said:

Admittedly in the case of an accidental deletion, it wouldn't help if i only noticed after a parity check.

When you delete something, parity agrees it has been deleted. Immediately! Parity is realtime.

I encourage you to reevaluate your "backup strategy". You don't have to backup everything, but you absolutely must have another copy of anything important and irreplaceable. You get to decide what qualifies.

Plenty of much more common ways to lose data besides a failed disk.

49 minutes ago, Barnoe said:

the only time i would need to make use of a backup is, if one of my drives failed.

This is exactly and only what parity is for, to rebuild a missing disk.

18 minutes ago, trurl said:

Plenty of much more common ways to lose data besides a failed disk.

And likely no data would be lost if a disk failed assuming parity plus ALL other disks are OK. So this is a scenario where backup doesn't come into play.

22 minutes ago, trurl said:

When you delete something, parity agrees it has been deleted. Immediately! Parity is realtime.

You seem to have some misconceptions about parity.

Make sure you setup Notifications to alert you immediately when a problem is detected. Don't let one unnoticed problem become multiple problems and data loss.