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Bit the bullet and Ordered My First NAS: QNAP TS-453Be (1 Viewer)

Ruz-El

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And I'm kinda freaking out since I'm not the most techy person. Mainly bought it to use as a plex box, get my library in one place.

Any set-up tips/warnings I should be aware of? I'm expecting it to arrive next week. Watching vids and stuff on the net, it seems pretty straight forward, but you know, I spent a bunch of money and freaking out haha.

Any advice would be appreciated. :)
 

John Dirk

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Congrats Russell. I'm reaching the point where I also need to consider some sort of NAS solution. Traditional RAID solutions just seem so antiquated to me, which is one of the main reasons I've been holding off.

This unit seems to have great Amazon reviews for the most part> I suspect you'll catch on pretty quickly without too much trouble.
 
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Ruz-El

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Congrats Russell. I'm reaching the point where I also need to consider some sort of NAS solution. Traditional RAID solutions just seen so antiquated to me, which is one of the main reasons I've been holding off.

This unit seems to have great Amazon reviews for the most part> I suspect you'll catch on pretty quickly without too much trouble.

The RAID aspect had me on the fence for a while too, since it looked like you were losing half your storage for protection. It's why I went with a 4-bay unit. With four 6TB I should get 16tb or so of storage using RAID5, with protection for one drive failure. That should be fine for my needs. I figure if I lose a drive I can replace with a 8th and start to bump up my storage that way.

I plan to keep my back-up drives so if I lose more than one drive at once, it will be a pain in the butt haha
 

DaveF

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This should be appliance-like: plug in drives and turn on. Fiddle a bit with preferences to set RAID 5 or whatever you prefer. Then get all your devices connected to it.

Hopefully it goes smoothly!
 

Ruz-El

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Thanks Dave! It went smoothly! I was a little stunned that it went so smoothly since I've never had a computer type thing set up so easily, I figured I was screwing something up haha. I did have it set to the wrong "volume", I was only showing 6TB of free space with RAID 5 with 4x6TB drives, but changed it to "THIN" and now I'm at 12+tb with 3.7TB (about 16tb total )set aside for "Snapshots" of protection that I can easily blank to use if need be. The other surprise is I didn't have to fiddle with PLEX settings like I recall having to do previously as well.

Not the most intuitive thing to use, I'm just not familiar enough with this stuff to know what all it is it's telling me. I'm getting it to do what I want it to do, so I figure I'll simply leave everything. Only thing I can't figure out is, I know it's designed to stay on all the time, but there doesn't seem to be way to tell if it's in stand bye/low power mode. Even when not in use you can hear the hard drives doing something periodically. Unless that's just how it is.

Now to fill the sucker up and hope that nothing fails after the warranty time haha. :)
 

Ruz-El

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Though I'd pop-on with an update.

So far everything is going fine! I'm really pleased with this qnap. I've been testing some different files and so far I've only encountered stuttering/buffering once with PLEX on a large file with multiple audio and subtitle streams that require transcoding. On my PS4 with wired network connections it plays fine, on the PS3 over wi-fi it stutters, and I'm tempted to chalk it up to the plex app itself as opposed to the qnap since the app doesn't appear to have ever had an update.

Only other issue I have is with PLEX itself, but I'm setting up the main plex media server to hopefully be future proof so that if they ever update the PS4 app my media with some custom tags will look as pretty and organized on the app as it does on my PC.

I've been on the fence about getting a NAS for years, so I want to thank everyone on the forum who had previously posted about them as it really helped me to make my choice and give me confidence in stepping forward. I LOVE YOU ALL! :D
 

Ruz-El

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I'm re-reading my old thread like a loser. A year later, and everything is great. I have it all set up, with customized collections in PLEX and it's nicer than I thought it would be. My only regret is getting 6TB drives. I should have bit the bullet and went bigger since I'm thinking of ripping DVDs and adding them to it since I'm sure I wont be able to get everything on there that I want. Ah well, I can always upgrade haha.
 

Stephen_J_H

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I'm re-reading my old thread like a loser. A year later, and everything is great. I have it all set up, with customized collections in PLEX and it's nicer than I thought it would be. My only regret is getting 6TB drives. I should have bit the bullet and went bigger since I'm thinking of ripping DVDs and adding them to it since I'm sure I wont be able to get everything on there that I want. Ah well, I can always upgrade haha.
My cousin currently has an 8 bay QNAP, but he works in IT. I've been mulling a NAS for some time, and you may have got me off the fence.
 

Ruz-El

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My cousin currently has an 8 bay QNAP, but he works in IT. I've been mulling a NAS for some time, and you may have got me off the fence.

If you're willing to take the time to set it up, I think it's really worth it! I did it really slow since I knew I wanted to keep the collections tight in plex. For example, I wanted all my Hammer films in one place, so I copied them all together and let plex update all it's metadata so I could then add all the films into a collection. So my plex looks like this when you look at the library:

upload_2019-9-18_11-25-27.png


Then when you click on the Hammer Films collection, All the films are displayed. I found the generic poster art for Hammer on the interenet, and copied the description from wikipedia

upload_2019-9-18_11-26-47.png


Nice thing is you can bunch everything into the collections. so at the bottom of the Hammer Films collection, there's a link to the TV series I have as I created a Hammer collection in the TV side of Plex:
upload_2019-9-18_11-28-35.png


So it's a bit of work, but I had fun doing it and it's organized way better than it was ever organize don a series of external hard drives plugged straight into my PS3. My obsessive itch is scratched. :)
 

Stephen_J_H

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I'm sure my wife would love it if I put something like this together, ripped all my various discs in various formats, then put the discs in storage.
 

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I'm sure my wife would love it if I put something like this together, ripped all my various discs in various formats, then put the discs in storage.

I’m doing that now and my wife is indeed loving it.

But I’m also, as a side effect, realizing how much I hate disc menus and forced trailers and how much better watching stuff is without them. That’s been the most fun so far. Putting an entire TV series into Plex and then not having to get up to switch discs, and not having to sit through 10 minutes of unskippable previews to watch a 20 minute episode. Or having a movie start ten seconds after I pick it out.

As an added bonus, all my discs are now being put into this thing. Great way to protect me for rare and our of print stuff. What I spent on the hard drives is less than the eBay prices would be if I had to replace out of print items if they hypothetically went bad or got lost.

I should have done this forever ago.
 

John Dirk

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But I’m also, as a side effect, realizing how much I hate disc menus and forced trailers and how much better watching stuff is without them. That’s been the most fun so far. Putting an entire TV series into Plex and then not having to get up to switch discs, and not having to sit through 10 minutes of unskippable previews to watch a 20 minute episode. Or having a movie start ten seconds after I pick it out.

AnyDVD HD my friend. :)

https://www.redfox.bz/en/anydvdhd.html
 

Ruz-El

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Not to be a total shill for PLEX, but when you're ripping your discs, you can rip the extras and have them show up with the movie when you click on it. there's file naming guides to help, I can post a link here later if need be. Plex isn't perfect, there's some play compatabiliy issues and what not depending on your device, but it's free and if it works, I really love it. :)

Here's a picture as an example of a disc I just did (I'm being a bastard and ripping discs before I sell/toss/give away):
upload_2019-9-18_14-35-53.png
 

JohnRice

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But I’m also, as a side effect, realizing how much I hate disc menus and forced trailers and how much better watching stuff is without them. That’s been the most fun so far. Putting an entire TV series into Plex and then not having to get up to switch discs, and not having to sit through 10 minutes of unskippable previews to watch a 20 minute episode. Or having a movie start ten seconds after I pick it out.
I don't do PLEX, but I started putting some media into iTunes years ago, and that's the biggest plus. I put every show I buy in for exactly that reason. It's so much easier to watch, and to keep track of where you are, plus if remembers across different systems.
 

Josh Steinberg

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I like Plex for storage and running the server, but for playback via an AppleTV, I like the Infuse app better than the Plex app. The AppleTV version of the Plex app has some limitations that Infuse is able to work around.
 

DaveF

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Not to be a total shill for PLEX, but when you're ripping your discs, you can rip the extras and have them show up with the movie when you click on it.
Just as an FYI, all the HTPC systems support extras. :)

I rip extras (most laborious part of the process). Lately, I’m watching extras streaming to my iPad when I’ve got ten minutes here and there.
 

Ruz-El

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Just as an FYI, all the HTPC systems support extras. :)

I rip extras (most laborious part of the process). Lately, I’m watching extras streaming to my iPad when I’ve got ten minutes here and there.

Thanks for the heads up! I've only used PLEX so it's nice to know that if they vanish for whatever reason I can move to something else relatively easy.

Another nice thing about the NAS I have (and I'm sure there are others with this feature) is it has HDMI out, so eventually when I upgrade my home theater amp I'll be able to plug it in and play stuff direct. QNAP has a media library software (which I have completely turned off since it seemed to be spending a billion hours generating thumbnails I didn't need so I can't comment on how user friendly or robust it is) and you can pick up a remote relatively cheaply for it as well.
 

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