NAS replacement for Plex and 4K hardware transcoding support

[fbuono]

Hello QNAP community,

I've been very happily using a TS-853 Pro for 8 years now, mainly to host Plex and its content, and Download Station. I used to have VMs on it but not anymore and for a while.
But time flies, available storage space gets thin and Plex 4k transcoding just don't happen like it does for 1080p (I don't blame its Celeron that did a fine job so far).
So i'm looking for a replacement that I hope will have the same lifetime and satisfaction rate.

I've identified TVS-h874, associated with 2x Samsung 980 Pro 2TB M.2 as RAID 1 to host the system (system pool) and mostly Plex database (currently 250GB) and Download Station temporary data (200GB on an average, 1TB in peak usage), whatever I go with QTS or QuTS, and 8x Seagate IronWolf Pro 16TB as RAID 50 to store backups and Plex content.
I've come up with this setup by following the best practices I found and understood so far.
I've also found some youtube videos of 4k hardware transcoding tests performed on this model and results seem pretty good.

I'm left with some questions I would be very grateful to have answers for from this community:
- QTS vs. QuTS, i get QuTS is the new QNAP OS and probably the only one that will be left in few years. I guess i should go with it to play the long game. Any gotchas i should be careful with considering my uses/needs? I know i can't add a disk to a storage pool with QuTS but since the NAS will be fully loaded from day 1, that is not an issue for me. I don't think I need any SSD caching as I don't use any database/VM/video editing solution. I heavily rely on Qfile and Qget apps on iOS to remotely access my current NAS, any restriction or loss of feature if I go with QuTS?
- I read there might be configurations of TVS-h874 available with Intel i7 or i9 on top of the i5 setup, but nothing on QNAP product page or on any online reseller website. What's the truth? https://nascompares.com/2022/09/09/new- ... -revealed/, https://www.nasmaster.com/qnaps-new-tvs ... re-i9-cpu/

Thanks by advance for your answers and inputs.

[dolbyman]

With 8 disks, go with RAID6(RAIDz2), no need for complicated nested RAIDs.

[fbuono]

With 8 disks, go with RAID6(RAIDz2), no need for complicated nested RAIDs.

Thanks for your input
Could you elaborate on prefering RAID 6 please?
I understand for the same disk number and storage capacity, R50 would increase read/write performance where R6 would increase disk fault tolerance.
Am i missing something?

[dolbyman]

For what would you need write read performance boosts?

With dual parity you will have two disks failure tolerance with a two disk storage penalty. The spinning disks will be for media storage, while your plex files will be on NVMe. The media storage only needs modest sequential performance. So why complicate things for no gain?

[fbuono]

I was thinking RAID 50 would be a bit better than RAID 5 considering the volume size. RAID 6 is appealing for fault tolerance but no performance gain compared to RAID 5, unless i’m wrong.
I’ve never lost one HDD in 12 years, thanks to Seagate quality, so i don’t expect to loose two at the same time. Perhaps i’m overconfident?

[dolbyman]

But again, why would you care about extra performance ? A single drive would be enough to serve multiple users with 4k files, let alone 8 disks in RAIDz2 (RAID6).

In RAID6, any 2 disks can fail, in RAID50 if two members of one RAID5 stripe group fail on rebuild, all is toast.

[fbuono]

I made assumptions based on my current TS-853 RAID 5 performances and experience, and wanted to make the right decisions for the new one that i want to keep as is for at least 5 years.
You made a valid point about RAID 6. Thank you very much for your input.

[jaysona]

I was thinking RAID 50 would be a bit better than RAID 5 considering the volume size. RAID 6 is appealing for fault tolerance but no performance gain compared to RAID 5, unless i’m wrong.
I’ve never lost one HDD in 12 years, thanks to Seagate quality, so i don’t expect to loose two at the same time. Perhaps i’m overconfident?

You're severely overthinking this, plex is a very simple setup and the notion of the need for some performance boost for plex is utterly unfounded.

I have a TVS-EC1080 10-bay NAS in RAID 5 currently populated with 14TB Exos (113.5 TB) which I am in the process of migrating to 18TB Exos drives. The volume easily handles 20 remote streams,

You will never come even close to reaching the data transfer bandwidth limits of the TVS-h874

[Skwor]

I was thinking RAID 50 would be a bit better than RAID 5 considering the volume size. RAID 6 is appealing for fault tolerance but no performance gain compared to RAID 5, unless i’m wrong.
I’ve never lost one HDD in 12 years, thanks to Seagate quality, so i don’t expect to loose two at the same time. Perhaps i’m overconfident?

You're severely overthinking this, plex is a very simple setup and the notion of the need for some performance boost for plex is utterly unfounded.

I have a TVS-EC1080 10-bay NAS in RAID 5 currently populated with 14TB Exos (113.5 TB) which I am in the process of migrating to 18TB Exos drives. The volume easily handles 20 remote streams,

You will never come even close to reaching the data transfer bandwidth limits of the TVS-h874

If I may humbly add, I use a 453Be and it rocks, I have run 14 streams from it in stress testing and it had no issues at all (2 were direct streams the rest were transcoding down from 1080 to either 720 or 480). I use no raid, instead I ensure I have 3-2-1 back ups and run all the discs independent. Honestly I do not need insane uptime, and recovery from a 12 TB disk is basically a day which I can tolerate. This removes any raid headaches and raid maintenance issues which I prefer, I like KISS, with the emphasis on the last S for me

You might find the current 653Be to be a good match

The only thing I would do different now is mirror one set like on the 653, 2 mirrored the rest unaided, the mirrored drives would be the system drives. Would be nice to raid recovery on that if ever needed.

[jaysona]

If I may humbly add, I use a 453Be and it rocks, I have run 14 streams from it in stress testing and it had no issues at all (2 were direct streams the rest were transcoding down from 1080 to either 720 or 480).
....

That Apollo Lake CPU based NAS is quite decent for plex when hardware transcoding (Quicksync) is used. Transcoding 4K and 1080p down will be a breeze.

.... I like KISS. With the emphasis on the last S for me

This is something that far too few practice with their setups. Simple and functional is almost always better than any bleeding edge complicated and convoluted setup.