I would like to make myself a media server and NAS which stores my photoes and files. I have an Optiplex 3070 with a 1 TB Hdd which i plan to use for my media server and want to buy a raspberry pi to use as a NAS for photos and files. What do you think ? will raspberry pi5 be enough, i want something small.
Just use the OptiPlex for everything. The RPi lacks the horsepower, and storage capability.
I’m currently using a 7 year old OptiPlex SFF as a NAS, backup point, media converter, and media server. I’ve upgraded the storage drive to 8TB.
I do have another old NAS I use only to duplicate my data store locally (I keep 3 local copies of data, and a cloud backup).
The OptiPlex draws 15w at idle, about 85w when converting video. My NAS draws about 5w at idle. I initially tried serving media from the NAS, but it’s performance is frankly abysmal. Instead I run Media Monkey, Jellyfin, and another media server on the Dell, which has no problem streaming to my crappy Samsung TV (not using an app, just the crappy built-in DLNA client) It works even better with decent devices, like my phone, laptop, iPad.
Your biggest concern with that Dell is the power consumption. As I said, mine happens to draw 15w at idle - I got lucky
What are the specs on your OptiPlex? Is it a mini tower or SFF? That would help more than just telling us the model.
Depending on your sensitivity to failures (drives die) I’d get 2 data drives for the Dell and mirror them, using the current drive just for the OS.
IMO, don’t buy an RPI. It’s overpriced and missing SATA and PCIE, so you would need to use USB-SATA and it’s not about moving big mount of data.
You might take a look at older Synology or build your own NAS and run TrueNAS on it
I’ve seen some mini PCs by GMKTech that are small form factor and can be reasonable priced. Anyone have experience with those? I’m in a similar position to OP.
Depends on what is inside, intel N100 or better CPUS are considered really good in general. There are some bad CPUs in mini-PCs though. Make sure the hardware has drivers for your choosen OS, not everything supports linux [well] even today. And every once in a while someone makes a PC with bad design and so it doesn’t work well for technical reasons.
There are a lot of small PCs that are low power that will work well. I haven’t used GMKTech’s, and one look at their website says I won’t try to navigate that mess. (why does everyone need a subscribe to our newsletter popup blocking my ability to see anything - I avoid anyone who abuses me like that)
Why have two computers doing basically the same job when you could just have one?
Have the NAS be the media server and save power and get better performance.
Do you mean the raspberry pi is going to have all the storage attached to it, with the optiplex just running Plex/JellyFin/Emby?
How many devices will you be streaming to, and what are they? Will you need to transcode any media to play it on other devices?
I would install truenas scale on the optiplex and run plex or jellyfin as a app from truenas.
Adding a second large drive for redundancy would be good, also a smallish ssd for the truenas os to run from.
My personal setup takes this level deeper. I have a desktop computer running proxmox. proxmox is installed on a nvme drive. I have a VM running truenas that I have passed my sata controller to. So my 2 10TB sata drives and my 500Gb sata ssd show up as native drives in truenas. The 10tb mirror holds my media library and long term backups. The 500gb ssd is for running apps on trunas like plex, syncthing.
I have a 512 gb ssd in the optiplex and 1 tb hdd on sata. Should I upgrade the hdd to a 4 tb and use the optiplex for media server and nas? Using truenas?
I would get multiple drives and do RAID. Here’s a helpful calculator to figure out drive quantity, size, and configuration. The reason to do RAID is redundancy. Hard drives will fail (even NAS branded drives). You do not want your photos, media, etc to be lost in that case. I personally do not go with anything below RAID5 (and for super sensitive things, I’ll even go RAID6 - despite the hit on overall capacity. If the optiplex has drive capacity for multiple drives, I strongly recommend you go this route.
