How to choose best Synology Nas for Kodi system?
#1
Hello,

I’m commited to getting a synology nas for my kodi setup in near future. Not sure how to pick one. My first nas.

Ive got a bunch of drives I plan to shuck ranging from16tb to 18tb. Figure I’ll need 5 to 6 bays depending on what’s available.

however not sure what the best one is or what to look for. Like does the ram matter I know ssd is not of interest. NOt sure what other options important. I’m hobbling with external hard drives, Mac mini and oppo203. using mkv backup iso for bluray and 4k hdr/dv. 

any recommendations based on experience? (Or if any newer versions of a current nas is about to come out and should wait for that. Thanks.

not sure if this was the right section for this question please direct me if elsewhere is better.
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#2
My simple view: you know what your current media collection size is, and if you are a true video hoarder, triple that disk size requirement. Keep a couple of HDD drives as spare just in case.
Synology has the one of, if not the, "best" NAS software support. Some 5 years for a new NAS device.

How many concurrent Kodi clients do you need to serve? Most 5+ NAS devices will have sufficient data throughput for all situations.
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#3
(2022-04-09, 06:37)Jman5150 Wrote: Hello,

I’m commited to getting a synology nas for my kodi setup in near future. Not sure how to pick one. My first nas.

Ive got a bunch of drives I plan to shuck ranging from16tb to 18tb. Figure I’ll need 5 to 6 bays depending on what’s available.

however not sure what the best one is or what to look for. Like does the ram matter I know ssd is not of interest. NOt sure what other options important. I’m hobbling with external hard drives, Mac mini and oppo203. using mkv backup iso for bluray and 4k hdr/dv. 

any recommendations based on experience? (Or if any newer versions of a current nas is about to come out and should wait for that. Thanks.

not sure if this was the right section for this question please direct me if elsewhere is better.

I actually have exactly the same question, so which NAS system did you pick? I'm currently thinking of the QNAP Turbo Station TS-453D which is a little bit cheaper than the Synology DiskStation DS920+ and has already 2.5GB Network ports as also lots of options for upgrades later if necessary.
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#4
A NAS with 2.5Gb network port is nice, but the rest of your network will need to have similar ports/speeds to put it to full use.
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#5
(2022-07-05, 00:44)Klojum Wrote: A NAS with 2.5Gb network port is nice, but the rest of your network will need to have similar ports/speeds to put it to full use.

Currently, I don't have any devices which support this, not my router (fritz box 7590ax), nor my media player which will be probably the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max, but I thought if I buy a NAS system now which should replace the external hard drives connected to my router, then I should buy something which is a little bit more fitting for future purposes, especially if it is 100€ cheaper than the nology DiskStation DS920+?
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#6
I would pretty much select any Synology NAS within your budget, the only thing to remener is the maximum volume size is 108TB.

There are Synnology NASs that can support more than 1 volume so keep this in mind.

I currently has two Synology NASs, a DS1010+ (5bay, with 3TB dives it has about 10TB of storage) that I use for backup, most of the time it is turned off and a DS1817+ (8 bay with 8 x 8TB disks, it has around 50TB of storage).

I have configured a MariaDB 10 installation on the NAS, this was I can stop a movie on one device and pick up where I left off on another! Great for when the missus gets home and want to watch telly and I want to keep watching, I just go upstaris and turn on the PC and keep watching. I takes a bit of configuration but it works reall well!

I am considering either replacing all of the disks in my NAS to 16TB or 22TB disks or getting a 12 bay NAS, I may just go for the 22TB drives for a start as I can move them to a 12 bay NAS later if needed.

The really important thing to remember is, actually the ONLY thing to remember, is as this is an investment in your data DO NOT use cheap drives like PC drives from Seagate, they will die within a couple of months, I lost EVERYTHING twice, at the time WD did not do NAS drives, now I have 8 x Red Pro and have only had a single drive failure! Keep a spare drive as well as you do not want to rely on a warranty return arriving soon after a drive fails!

The bottom line is get what you can afford, I did, although the 1010+ was about all icould get at the time, now Synology has over 40 devices with even a 60 bay monster!!!

Take your time and overspec your disk capacity!!

Good luck!!!
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#7
(2022-12-22, 13:01)blancherama Wrote: I would pretty much select any Synology NAS within your budget, the only thing to remener is the maximum volume size is 108TB.

There are Synnology NASs that can support more than 1 volume so keep this in mind.

I currently has two Synology NASs, a DS1010+ (5bay, with 3TB dives it has about 10TB of storage) that I use for backup, most of the time it is turned off and a DS1817+ (8 bay with 8 x 8TB disks, it has around 50TB of storage).

I have configured a MariaDB 10 installation on the NAS, this was I can stop a movie on one device and pick up where I left off on another! Great for when the missus gets home and want to watch telly and I want to keep watching, I just go upstaris and turn on the PC and keep watching. I takes a bit of configuration but it works reall well!

I am considering either replacing all of the disks in my NAS to 16TB or 22TB disks or getting a 12 bay NAS, I may just go for the 22TB drives for a start as I can move them to a 12 bay NAS later if needed.

The really important thing to remember is, actually the ONLY thing to remember, is as this is an investment in your data DO NOT use cheap drives like PC drives from Seagate, they will die within a couple of months, I lost EVERYTHING twice, at the time WD did not do NAS drives, now I have 8 x Red Pro and have only had a single drive failure! Keep a spare drive as well as you do not want to rely on a warranty return arriving soon after a drive fails!

The bottom line is get what you can afford, I did, although the 1010+ was about all icould get at the time, now Synology has over 40 devices with even a 60 bay monster!!!

Take your time and overspec your disk capacity!!

Good luck!!!
I'm looking to do this too. We've multiple devices in our house, with Kodi accessing all our ripped movies, music and old converted family videos. I followed a guide on YT on how to to utilize MariaDB 10 but the video was 2yrs old and when I got to the step that I needed the IP of it, I got stuck as it no longer shows up on DS7. Any info or guides you can suggest please? Thanks VM....
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#8
(2022-12-22, 13:01)blancherama Wrote: I would pretty much select any Synology NAS within your budget, the only thing to remener is the maximum volume size is 108TB.

There are Synnology NASs that can support more than 1 volume so keep this in mind.

I currently has two Synology NASs, a DS1010+ (5bay, with 3TB dives it has about 10TB of storage) that I use for backup, most of the time it is turned off and a DS1817+ (8 bay with 8 x 8TB disks, it has around 50TB of storage).

I have configured a MariaDB 10 installation on the NAS, this was I can stop a movie on one device and pick up where I left off on another! Great for when the missus gets home and want to watch telly and I want to keep watching, I just go upstaris and turn on the PC and keep watching. I takes a bit of configuration but it works reall well!

I am considering either replacing all of the disks in my NAS to 16TB or 22TB disks or getting a 12 bay NAS, I may just go for the 22TB drives for a start as I can move them to a 12 bay NAS later if needed.

The really important thing to remember is, actually the ONLY thing to remember, is as this is an investment in your data DO NOT use cheap drives like PC drives from Seagate, they will die within a couple of months, I lost EVERYTHING twice, at the time WD did not do NAS drives, now I have 8 x Red Pro and have only had a single drive failure! Keep a spare drive as well as you do not want to rely on a warranty return arriving soon after a drive fails!

The bottom line is get what you can afford, I did, although the 1010+ was about all icould get at the time, now Synology has over 40 devices with even a 60 bay monster!!!

Take your time and overspec your disk capacity!!

Good luck!!!

Synology makes good NAS devices but for less money, with more flexibility, you could roll your own server.  Here's a link to my setup.   I concur with you on drives.  I buy nothing but Seagate Enterprise drives.  They aren't made for NAS devices but they work great with my Highpoint RAID controllers and Seagate makes NAS specific versions of them.  I've never lost any data in over 10 years.  I just installed 8 x 20TB drives in my backup server.  Here's a history of my server builds.  I run Mezzmo with the Mezzmo Kodi addon, which takes my maintenance time to near zero across all my Kodi clients and automates just about everything.

Just something to consider.


Jeff
Running with the Mezzmo Kodi addon.  The easier way to share your media with multiple Kodi clients.
Service.autostop , CBC Sports, Kodi Selective Cleaner and Mezzmo Kodi addon author.
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#9
Synology is not the only option, there are many out there.  Many folks make their own using free/open source NAS software, but I personally like and have been using QNAP NAS's for the last 8 years or so. 

The one I'm currently using is the TS-932PX.  This unit has 5x 3.5" drive bays, as well as 4x 2.5" drive bays.  I have 5x 16TB Seagate IronWolf drives in there in a RAID 5 configuration, which gives me about 59TB.  I also have 2 1TB SSD's currently in the 2.5" drive bays, and I'm using those as cache to speed things up.  Anyway, I really like the QNAP QTS Operating system, it's really functional, fast, full featured and easy to understand and setup.

The few things things I would caution anyone looking for their first NAS, regardless of which NAS you buy, are: 

1.  Make sure the NAS has a decent processor.  Some of the ARM processors (like the one in My NAS) are very good, but some low cost NAS use low cost, entry level CPUs like Intel Atoms), and while they do the job, they're very slow, and you'll see that lack of performance not so much playing media back, but when you're copying data between the NAS and your other devices, like your PC.  A good NAS, connected to a Windows PC or MAC via Gbit LAN, should give you a little over 100MB/se transfers.  If you get a NAS with 2.5Gbit and you have the hardware to match at the other end, you should be able to trasfer data at 300MB/sec.  Some cheap NAS, especially when you setup a RAID 5, they do all that in software, rather than a hardware RAID, so their performance sucks ( about 20~25MB/sec).

2.  Consider the noise.  I don't know where you will place your NAS, but consider this:  A lot of the high-end, rackmount units, are meant to be installed in a server room.  The have lots of drives, but they also have lots of fan blowers for the drives, the CPU(s) and the server box.  When these things get truned on, they make enough noise that you can hear them from the next room.  Even when sitting there, idling they are still noisy.  If you're like me and end up putting the server somewhere nearby (maybe the same room as your media player), you will soon learn to dislike it, if not downright hate it.  Some of the smaller boxes, towers, are much quiter, as they are meant for smaller rooms, not enterprise  server rooms.

I used to have a 8x drive TS-879U-RP.  Nice machine, but I had to part with it because of the noise.  The new unit I have, is superquiet.  The only time I hear it is when I'm either doing some mass copying, or when I tell KODI  to scrape a large folder.
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#10
Well laid out @Dudeman I agree with almost everything.

I would like to add this though.

Network throughput will not guarantee transfer rate. On my NAS I'm constantly at the mercy of the physical disk speed, one of them happens to be a Seagate Archive drive which is noticeably slower than my Exos drives.

Consideration to build your own NAS or buy one you can also add the parameter of the GPU.

I didn't exactly look for this on previous NAS boxes but I ended up building one with a decent GPU which works out to enable me to utilize live transcoding features from FFMpeg via hardware acceleration, some media server offers utilize this as well (Emby/Jellyfin/Plex).

Pure rack servers are an entirely different animal and if you're not a systems architect you may not know how different they are.

Thanks for sharing.
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#11
I would also add another caveat - which is why I went for unRAID.  

Some RAID protocols render individual disks unreadable outside the array or NAS they are running in, should you have a catastrophic failure of your NAS (either through multiple discs dying or because the NAS itself dies causing the remaining discs to be potentially unreadable if your replacement NAS doesn't use the same exact RAID protocol implementation)

unRAID (and there are others that work similarly) keeps the storage discs in a standard file format - so even if the array dies you don't lose everything as each surviving disc remains entirely readable.  The parity protection in unRAID is implemented without the main data storage drive formats being proprietary.
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#12
As long as you do not video decoding on the NAS (Plex) all new Synology NAS systems are good enough.
I use the 10 years old DS213+ and even this device is strong enough to deliver high quality UHD BluRay video streams to kodi.
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#13
Request someone to comment on:
Is it better to add NAS Movie folders to Kodi as NFS or SMB sources.
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#14
(2023-02-23, 16:49)tuareg Wrote: Request someone to comment on:
Is it better to add NAS Movie folders to Kodi as NFS or SMB sources.
Summary: NFS versus SMB
  • NFS better for Unix/Linux, while SMB better for Windows.
  • NFS requires extra tools to support Apple, but SMB does not.
  • NFS runs in Unix/Linux and Windows; SMB needs Samba to do so.
  • NFS file locking is mandatory or advisory, but SMB locking is mandatory.
  • NFS has no fast file find; SMB has fast find.
  • NFS no server and printer browsing, while SMB has server and printer browsing.
  • NFS slower reads and writes; SMB faster.
  • NFS better with small files, while SMB fine with small files but better with large files.
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#15
Does SMB work with OSX anymore ? I gave up trying to connect to my mac from kodi on a shield years ago. If it wasn't for PlexKodiConnect I would not have been able use kodi when I had a mac as a server. had to buy a windows PC to use instead.
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