Who is using a NAS to play MKV files. (1 Viewer)

[moordb]

I can't stand HDR. Makes me dizzy. I have it turned off on all of our TVs.

I don't understand how a wider color range would make you dizzy?

 

[Nex]

I don't understand how a wider color range would make you dizzy?

People are much more different than most others believe when it comes to using one's bodily senses to experience the world.

 

[Chip1525]

Did not expect to find this thread on a poker chip forum, but since it is here and there seem to be more than a few members who know about this sort of thing - I have been using a similar setup (NAS to play MKVs via Plex) but recently have had issues with mechanical failure of HDDs.

I am getting tired of this and wondering if switching to SSDs in the NAS would help. Does anyone have any experience with SSDs instead of HDDs in a NAS? Do I still have to worry about write cycles if the SSDs will only be used to store movies to be watched via Plex?

I am a new member here so sorry if this is getting too far off topic from poker chips.

 

[buffalojim]

Did not expect to find this thread on a poker chip forum, but since it is here and there seem to be more than a few members who know about this sort of thing - I have been using a similar setup (NAS to play MKVs via Plex) but recently have had issues with mechanical failure of HDDs.

I am getting tired of this and wondering if switching to SSDs in the NAS would help. Does anyone have any experience with SSDs instead of HDDs in a NAS? Do I still have to worry about write cycles if the SSDs will only be used to store movies to be watched via Plex?

I am a new member here so sorry if this is getting too far off topic from poker chips.

That's what this section is for man, off-topic stuff. I don't use Plex and don't have SSDs in my NAS but I would say that you shouldn't really have to worry about wearing them out. I could be wrong about this but I have SSDs in my main rig for years and write and read from them constantly and their performance hasn't degraded a bit, this is going on probably 5 - 7 years now. I have M.2 and SATA based SSDs and have never had an issue with any of them. The issues I see using SSDs is the limited storage capacity compared to spinning rust and the cost per GB.

 

[Nex]

As far as I understand the technology, SSDs can be read from infinitely (in theory), only the writing is limited as the memory cells wear down when their charge state is changed. This amplifies the more bits of information are stored in a physical cell, which is why e.g. the new QLC (4 bits per cell) type SSDs have a much shorter life expectancy than TLC (3 bits), MLC (2 bits), SLC (1 bit) type ones. Of course the disks get significantly more expensive the fewer bits are saved per cell as you then need more cells (hardware) to save the same amount of information.

SSDs are overprovisioned usually, i.e. they pack more storage cells than can be addressed and used. When one cell fails (is worn out), a standby one takes over. The disk firmware also tries to ensure cells are equally worn down as data gets written, however this requires the host system to inform the SSD about data blocks that are no longer needed (TRIM). Modern systems and certainly modern NASes support this.

Because of this technique, SSDs are able to very precisely predict their state of wear, so the host system can be made aware well in time if SSDs are close to failure (when the number of leftover overprovisioned cells is shrinking)

One thing where HDDs beat SSDs however is data retention. SSDs have a battery embedded to amend this, but basically when the SSD has no more charge, the data stored is lost. And batteries can only save so much charge. That is why SSDs are unfit for longer-term offline storage. But if you have them in a NAS that gets used regularly, it should be fine.

 

[Chip1525]

Thanks for the helpful replies! Think I will take the plunge and change to SSDs.

Will post back if things go horribly (and expensively) wrong in case others are thinking of the same move.

 

[RainmanTrail]

Did not expect to find this thread on a poker chip forum, but since it is here and there seem to be more than a few members who know about this sort of thing - I have been using a similar setup (NAS to play MKVs via Plex) but recently have had issues with mechanical failure of HDDs.

I am getting tired of this and wondering if switching to SSDs in the NAS would help. Does anyone have any experience with SSDs instead of HDDs in a NAS? Do I still have to worry about write cycles if the SSDs will only be used to store movies to be watched via Plex?

I am a new member here so sorry if this is getting too far off topic from poker chips.

Are you using the server quality HDDs that are specifically designed for NAS setups, or just regular HDDs? This could be your problem if you're not using the proper hard drives.

 

[Chip1525]

WD Red NAS HDDs. May have just gotten unlucky, but had 3 of them fail within a year of each other.

 

[Nex]

Do they happen to be of 6TB or lower capacity?

If yes, then here's the reason: these are shitty SMR drives. There was a huge shitstorm around WD for sneaking this unfit tech into drives marketed for NAS use.

 

[buffalojim]

Do they happen to be of 6TB or lower capacity?

If yes, then here's the reason: these are shitty SMR drives. There was a huge shitstorm around WD for sneaking this unfit tech into drives marketed for NAS use.

I remember hearing about this. It is super shitty by WD. Personally I've had good luck with Seagate Ironwolf 10 & 12 TB drives.

 

[RainmanTrail]

Do they happen to be of 6TB or lower capacity?

If yes, then here's the reason: these are shitty SMR drives. There was a huge shitstorm around WD for sneaking this unfit tech into drives marketed for NAS use.

I'm pretty sure I have 4 or 5 of those drives in my Synology NAS. Have been running it for about 5 or 6 years now without any issues with the drives. My Synology unit itself crapped out about 3 years ago, but they replaced it for free. I just swapped the drives into the new NAS. You've got me worried though... Maybe I should upgrade my drives?

 

[Nex]

As far as I understood it, the 6 TB and smaller drives weren't always the bad SMR ones. At some point in time, WD simply changed the designs of these drives and switched from traditional recording to SMR while labelling them (almost) the same and doing no announcement that anything had changed.

Quick Google search turned this up on how to identify the bad apples. Apparently the giveaway seems to be the cache size which is significantly bigger on the SMR models. They also have product codes to compare (-EFRX being the good ones, -EFAX the bad ones among 2TB-6TB capacity)

Anyway, the drive capacity level that currently offers the best $/GB is the 8 TB tier. 16 TB drives cost negligibly more if you can find a sale. At least this is for european prices, and if you shuck external drives (white label) rather than buying bulk drives. For the 16ers, Seagate seems to be cheaper than WD at the moment (their external contains a white label enterprise grade Exos drive on that capacity level). So if you want to upgrade, it wouldn't make sense to do hot swaps just to replace bad apples, but to set up a whole new array with drives of a different capacity.

 

[Chip1525]

Do they happen to be of 6TB or lower capacity?

If yes, then here's the reason: these are shitty SMR drives. There was a huge shitstorm around WD for sneaking this unfit tech into drives marketed for NAS use.

Bingo. 6TB.

 

[buffalojim]

Here's a list... I subscribe to these guys youtube channel...

https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/

If I'm not mistaken WD moved to those SMR driver within the last year.

https://www.techspot.com/news/84973-wd-publishes-complete-list-smr-drives-following-user.html

 

[moordb]

Bingo. 6TB.

Your drives are too old to be SMR. WD only started using SMR in their NAS Red line two years ago. You are good.

 

[RainmanTrail]

Quick Google search turned this up on how to identify the bad apples. Apparently the giveaway seems to be the cache size which is significantly bigger on the SMR models. They also have product codes to compare (-EFRX being the good ones, -EFAX the bad ones among 2TB-6TB capacity)

Your drives are too old to be SMR. WD only started using SMR in their NAS Red line two years ago. You are good.

Mine were purchased in 2015 and are the WD60EFRX model with 64MB cache, so it looks like I have the good ones. Thanks for the info.

 

[Nex]

Depending on how long you have your NAS running each day, you might still want to look into replacing your disks preemptively soon.

The RAID I screwed up in the beginning of last year... where I paid over 4k euros to a recovery service... after I got the recovered files and the drives back, I checked the latters' stats to see if they still were any good. Two of them had already started reporting unrecoverable read errors - one of them in a LOT of blocks. Very small part of the recovered files were actually corrupted from that (luckily only so few, likely because the corrupted blocks apparently were all in a cluster and it was just a few very big files that were saved on these blocks). Back when I set the NAS up there was no such thing as file systems that can integrity-check the contents of files yet available, let alone automatically fixing found corruptions from a known-good copy. New Synos that support the btrfs file system (many, but not their smallest models) can do this for you now if you set it up the right way.

This NAS ran for little over 6 years, it was powered nearly 24/7 but had hard disk spindown enabled (i.e. less "effective" power-on-hours, but tons of spinups).

On my newly setup NAS, I have scheduled preemptive disk replacements/re-setup with larger drives at the latest after 5 years of service. In addition I have enabled advanced integrity checking (eats some disk space but enables the following) and monthly data scrubbing where the NAS will try to read the whole disk contents out, and if any read errors occur on one disk, will try to fix them by overwriting the block with a known good copy from one of the other disks. It's extremely unlikely that all disks develop some data corruption at the exact same location, especially when you do a monthly check/fix. I also have a routine S.M.A.R.T. check set up that'll timely alert me via email if any drive starts reporting problems. And even if that fails, I still have two full offline backups I can restore from.

 

[RainmanTrail]

Good advice. I think it's probably about time for me to consider upgrading my system.

 

[crussader]

It has begun!

Of course I upgraded from my original plan. Today UPS brought me a Synology DS1520+ and 5 WD red 6TB drives (cmr version). Setup was simple. Right now it's verifying the drives. Looks like that's going to take a while (2.5 hours in and I'm at 23 percent). I went ahead and set up some folders, but I'm not going to start transferring files until everything is verified.

Setting up the back end looks to be a breeze. I'm expecting the front end configuration to be a bit more complicated.

 

[crussader]

Ok. First roadblock.

I have set up some shared folders on the NAS and I populated some with mkv files. Installed plex client on a TCL roku tv. Installed the plex server app on the NAS.

When I go to the plex client on the tv, it can see the NAS, but doesn't see any contents.

Thoughts?

 

[Nex]

Does the server app need configuration?
If it doesn't, did you check if the Synology system itself is configured to index the folders you put the MKV files in? (System settings -> Media indexing, bottom row "applications")

 

[crussader]

In the control panel there is something called "Indexing Service". I went in there and pointed it to one of the shared folders and designated it as video. However I don't think any indexing was actually done. Folder contents still not visible on tv.

 

[Nex]

Indexing takes a while to run/complete, particularly if it's many files in one go. Does it say "Status. completed" in the settings section?
Update: Google says apparently you need to grant the system user "Plex" at least read permissions on the folders with your media

 

[crussader]

Doesn't say anything on the "Status:" line.

 

[crussader]

Not any I/O activity going on with the NAS box either

 

[Nex]

Google says you need to explicitly grant a system user named "plex" read access on the shared folder with your media files.

 

[crussader]

I did think of that and already have that set up

 

[RainmanTrail]

Google says you need to explicitly grant a system user named "plex" read access on the shared folder with your media files.

This

 

[crussader]

I think I need to register a plex account. I already got too many accounts but I don't think I have a choice

 

[Nex]

I think I need to register a plex account. I already got too many accounts but I don't think I have a choice

Synology has more ways to stream media to a TV. There is another server package called Media Server. I'm not into this, I don't even have a TV, but apparently there's some open standard called DLNA that doesn't require any external services, accounts and the likes like Plex apparently does.