UGreen DXP8800+ 8-bay NAS with Zidoo Z9X Pro and also Plex Server (1 Viewer)

[John Dirk]

For me the real impediment is time. Ordering a disc, waiting for it to arrive, finding the couple hours to rip, do metadata, save on HTPC: it’s a week before I can watch. Or, spend five minutes searching and hit play on a streaming movie and watch in the moment.

Can't argue with you there, which is essentially why I haven't bothered with 4K discs. I'd just rather stick to physical media or a streaming alternative for those. For the vast majority of my collection, however, DVD and Blu Ray rips are fine and being retired makes the time investment much more palatable.

My HTPC is dying a death of neglect against the vast convenience of streaming services.

That's quite poetic, Dave! What I've found is my HTPC has the power to be a much more capable Plex server than my Sylology NAS or even the Shield Pro. The latter seemed like a great alternative but I still ended up with yet another remote to wrangle, so I figured why bother when I can just use the Plex for HTPC app and my wireless keyboard.

 

[John Dirk]

The tools to match the objective.

Absolutely. I love discussing and learning about the approaches and tools others have employed. It can be a big help in developing my own solutions but, in the end, no approach is universal. It's all about what works for you in your space.

I see people here probably spending thousands of $ on hard drives alone, in order to put everything they own on NAS. That seems completely absurd to me.

As @DaveF explained, no one is doing that since disc space is almost negligibly cheap these days but the time investment can be substantial. If I understood a previous post correctly, aren't you ripping your titles too for use by the Zidoo player? If so, a NAS unit would provide you with a level of protection should you experience a drive failure.

 

[JohnRice]

If I was to put my entire collection on NAS, it would cost at least a couple thousand $ in drives. There are people who seem to be doing that. Add in NAS hardware costs, and the total is far from what I consider to be “negligible”. I use the Zidoo for HD TV shows and Reg B movies, and a couple blurays that seem to be problematic.

For movies, I know I’m an idiot, but the idea of buying a movie, putting it in a disc player and just watching it is appealing. Then I move on with life.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I think I have eight drives in my setup and each was probably between $100-200, plus each drive has a backup, so that’s sixteen in total - it does add up fast. I didn’t start with those all at once so the cost was split over several years of converting discs to hard drive files, but I agree that there’s both a financial and a time cost if you have a large collection.

My setup is basically “done” - I do not add my new 4K UHD discs that have come with digital copies and/or Blu-ray copies. And now that I’ve had this system for over five years, I’ve begun weeding through it and removing titles that have never been watched on it and getting rid of the corresponding discs. There are too many things on it where I bought the disc in 2010, never watched it, ripped the disc to Plex in 2020, and still never watched it, and I’m trying to walk that line between “organizing” and “hoarding.” I don’t need or want my library to be simply a collection of things that I’ve once seen but have no practical interest in seeing again. It’s not enough for the movie or show to have been good (or even outstanding) - my priorities have changed and my focus is now on keeping things that bring me joy to have rather than holding onto things that feel like obligations. It’s a work in progress that may take years to finish sorting through but I’m glad to be doing it. The alternative - perpetually adding new drives for the rest of my life and increasing the number of items present in the collection without increasing the frequency in which they’re watched - no longer appeals to me.

 

[JohnRice]

I think I have eight drives in my setup and each was probably between $100-200, plus each drive has a backup, so that’s sixteen in total - it does add up fast. I didn’t start with those all at once so the cost was split over several years of converting discs to hard drive files, but I agree that there’s both a financial and a time cost if you have a large collection.

My setup is basically “done” - I do not add my new 4K UHD discs that have come with digital copies and/or Blu-ray copies. And now that I’ve had this system for over five years, I’ve begun weeding through it and removing titles that have never been watched on it and getting rid of the corresponding discs. There are too many things on it where I bought the disc in 2010, never watched it, ripped the disc to Plex in 2020, and still never watched it, and I’m trying to walk that line between “organizing” and “hoarding.” I don’t need or want my library to be simply a collection of things that I’ve once seen but have no practical interest in seeing again. It’s not enough for the movie or show to have been good (or even outstanding) - my priorities have changed and my focus is now on keeping things that bring me joy to have rather than holding onto things that feel like obligations. It’s a work in progress that may take years to finish sorting through but I’m glad to be doing it. The alternative - perpetually adding new drives for the rest of my life and increasing the number of items present in the collection without increasing the frequency in which they’re watched - no longer appeals to me.

The funny thing is, we’re saying the same thing. The only difference is that after considering doing the whole NAS thing multiple times, I have always stopped myself before diving in. For the same reasons you give, after having done it.

 

[DaveF]

Can't argue with you there, which is essentially why I haven't bothered with 4K discs. I'd just rather stick to physical media or a streaming alternative for those. For the vast majority of my collection, however, DVD and Blu Ray rips are fine and being retired makes the time investment much more palatable.

That's quite poetic, Dave! What I've found is my HTPC has the power to be a much more capable Plex server than my Sylology NAS or even the Shield Pro. The latter seemed like a great alternative but I still ended up with yet another remote to wrangle, so I figured why bother when I can just use the Plex for HTPC app and my wireless keyboard.

I saved the cost of the NAS in 2016 by making my HTPC server also the RAID (running SnapRAID) and buying designing around PC case that holds 5+ HDD, and SSD, and an optical drive.

If I were actively expanding my disc collection, I’d move to a standalone NAS for storage

If I was to put my entire collection on NAS, it would cost at least a couple thousand $ in drives. There are people who seem to be doing that. Add in NAS hardware costs, and the total is far from what I consider to be “negligible”. I use the Zidoo for HD TV shows and Reg B movies, and a couple blurays that seem to be problematic.

For movies, I know I’m an idiot, but the idea of buying a movie, putting it in a disc player and just watching it is appealing. Then I move on with life.

It’s not negligible. But it’s likely a single-digit percentage of the cost of the movie collection. But it hits harder because the movies were bought over years while setting up the NAS by anyone with an existing collection in its the full cost in a single purchase.

But this spending money on a DIY streaming system is not a wholly rational decision. It’s very much an emotional decision: the desire to build and own your personal Netflix. It’s also a splurge on a hobby, which are lots of money in exchange for fun.

I’d like to continue my HTPC endeavor but it’s harder and harder to figure out its place in my life given the state of media in 2025.

 

[DaveF]

…

I have started out with six 24-TB Seagate Exos drives in RAID5 giving me 120TB of storage to start. This leaves two bays free to add a backup drive if one fails and possibly another drive for storage. Either way I have some room to grow. I did expand the NAS system memory from 8GB to 32GB and added a 4-TB NVMe Gen4 Corsair module for a Win10Pro VM to extract and merge files. I will be adding a UPS next to hopefully keep the volume safe in the event of power outage.

It's also been a learning experience getting back into using some Linux skills I haven't used for several years. Also I would like to thank UGreen support for being responsive when I was having issues getting my Windows 10 VM setup to use the physical USB3.2 port. For some reason the VM creation tool has options to add USB2/3 functionality in the VM but its not actually implemented in the tool yet or there is a bug, but UGreen provided support on how to configure it through a SSH terminal session into the line command UGOS interface (based on Linux). It's been working rock solid making it much easier to rip by being able to remote into the NAS with the LG WH16NS40 connected instead of having a USB drive hang off my laptop.
…

You’re saying the NAS has a desktop Intel CPU and runs windows or Linux? I’m ignorant on how this works and how it plays into the HTPC server system. Can you elaborate?

 

[John Dirk]

If I was to put my entire collection on NAS, it would cost at least a couple thousand $ in drives. There are people who seem to be doing that. Add in NAS hardware costs, and the total is far from what I consider to be “negligible”.

Well, the term "negligible" here was clearly used subjectively but, what I was referring to is the cost of HDD's, especially compared to what they used to cost. The NAS system is a separate, and definitely not negligible, one-time investment.

We should all enjoy our hobby and spend our hard-earned dollars however we choose, however, a NAS system gives you data protection [via RAID] and does basically everything the Vidoo and Eversolo do combined, and for less. Add Plex [or similar absolutely free] and you can access your library on any modern device, even remotely.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

The funny thing is, we’re saying the same thing. The only difference is that after considering doing the whole NAS thing multiple times, I have always stopped myself before diving in. For the same reasons you give, after having done it.

But this spending money on a DIY streaming system is not a wholly rational decision. It’s very much an emotional decision: the desire to build and own your personal Netflix. It’s also a splurge on a hobby, which are lots of money in exchange for fun.

I think there’s some truth to both of those things, and it’s been helpful for me at times to remind myself what the goal has been, or to adjust that goal as times and needs have changed. When I started it, it allowed me to retain access to my media collection when life changes made it not practical to have my collection on display (or even on site) for a couple years.

The big thing now is that I like the benefits I’ve gained most specifically with TV shows - it’s nice to have a system that keeps track of where I left off with difgerent shows, and that makes it easy to bounce around without swapping discs in and out and sitting through five minutes of menus for each different 21-minute sitcom episode. And that’s still something very useful to me.

A lot of my favorite films are titles that aren’t hugely popular in the 21st century and no longer readily available. As other people deal with disc failures on their collections, having these titles both backed up and portable has been worthwhile.

4K just seems like the natural point to stop. The increased data size of those discs would take my drive needs to a level I’m not ready to contemplate. Also important: projectors aren’t automatically great at HDR metadata. The 4K disc player I picked out does a better job of converting that 4K HDR content for display on a projector than the Plex clients do. And most new release 4K discs come with both digital copies and Blu-ray versions, so in terms of having backup copies and having portable copies, I’m already set.

My current thinking is to keep the Plex setup in place, continue slimming my collection for titles it’s obvious that I will never ever watch again, and to use it as the repository for archaic media formats and new things that don’t come with their own backups. That protects my previous disc purchases, preserves the functionality I’ve come to enjoy, without leaving me on the hook for a lifetime of perpetual upgrades and ripping.

The idea of having every bit of media I own in one centralized location is appealing, but the reality of how I consume media goes against putting all of my eggs solely in that basket.