Nas for Plex and different size drives

[Qasim]

Hi everyone

 

First ever post so sorry if its on the wrong thread and too much info/not well explained.  

 

I want to buy a Synology DS218j for a simple plex setup. 

 

My thoughts were to buy a Nvida sheild and connect it to my NAS. 

 

My actual question is: In this NAS can i use different size hdd

 

I have a 3tb hdd and a 2 tb hdd for the bays and a 1tb hdd 2.5 as an external plugged in. Will I be able to use all the space? 

 

Im not bothered if i loose data tbh i just want to maximise the amount of space i can use. Raid confuses me so i was hoping for clarity on here. 

 

As well as movies etc i will add some family films on one of the drives which i will backup on my laptop regulerly. 

[trurl]

It's unclear from your post if you are planning to use Unraid. Are you? 

[Qasim]

Hi, Im not sure, would you say Unraid is the way foward? Im not even sure what unraid is tbh

[trurl]

3 hours ago, Qasim said:

Im not even sure what unraid is tbh

Why did you post your question to the Unraid forum? Just following a random google search?

 

I don't know if that Synology you are thinking about can be converted to Unraid or not.

 

Unraid is a NAS operating system. Many people use it on computers they have built for that purpose, some use it on prebuilt computers. But the main thing is it is an Operating System and would have to replace whatever OS is already on that Synology

[Sparkles]

unRaid is it's own OS and is used for people to custom build a NAS type solution using PC hardware. The NAS you are looking at is an out of the box solution. unRaid is an alternative to Typical RAID based solutions as it uses it's own storage system with parity to give greater flexibility over standard RAID/NAS solutions

 

For that synology box, it's 2 drives so all redundancy is basically just 1:1 MIrror so you will be able to use 50% of your total storage and both devices need to be the same. If they are not the same size, then it will match the larger one to the smaller one  and with you setup being a 3TB and 2 TB you will only have 2TB of storage space. If you can setup each driver as it's own logical drive you could have 5TB of storage space, however keep in mind this will be formatted as ext4, so if you want to add a bigger drive you would need to connect the drive to another system that can read ext4 file systems and then copy everything back to the new drive. Or you would need another drive to act as a temp storage to swap it. 

 

If you had a spare PC with unRaid you will get 3 TB of storage space as the 3TB HDD will be used as parity and the 2TB and 1 TB as storage. It should go without saying that unRaid will have far more longevity than any out of the box solution as well as proper scalability where you can add new drives with little difficulty.

 

 

 

[Qasim]

Hi 

 

TYVM for that clear explanation, it makes a lot of sense. Still need to put more thought into this i guess

[Sparkles]

2 hours ago, Qasim said:

Hi 

 

TYVM for that clear explanation, it makes a lot of sense. Still need to put more thought into this i guess

if you have  spare hardware and a USB drive you can always try unraid for 30 days. There is very little to lose at this point giving it a shot.