Posted: 7/25/2025 8:45:39 PM EDT
[Last Edit: nikdfish][Edited]
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Recently went from 5Mb DSL to Starlink, kinda rural and no cable, fiber or WISP alternatives. That was the impetus to redo the house networking. Turns out the Starlink Gen3 router/mesh is actually decent enough to not need use of 3rd party equipment. I did add a Starlink mini-router as a mesh node & to provide wired connections (using a small GB switch) for some of my equipment. I took the funds I had mentally earmarked for 3rd party mesh hardware & picked up a TerraMaster F2423 NAS unit. The idea being to add another option for local machine backups, including phone pics, etc. I also have hundreds of audiobooks and ebooks and well over a thousand DVD's including TV series & movies. The F2-423 comes diskless with 4GB DDR4 RAM installed in one of two slots, 2 M.2 NVMe slots and 2 HDD hot swap bays. I also ordered another 16GB RAM to increase total memory to 20GB, a 256GB M.2 NVMe for the system drive (Volume 1) and an 8TB ironwolf drive for storage (Volume 2). After getting things running I went through the upgrade sequence to get the machine to TOS 6. I figured I could play with TOS 6 and see how it worked. I could always fall back to using something like TrueNAS if it was squirrelly. After playing around trying various apps & getting a feel for how things worked I added a second SSD (1TB) and another 8TB ironwolf drive. Volume 1 & 2 were then rebuilt as JBOD configurations with more space. I loaded a TB or so of DVD's & books to have something to work with. I also learned a bit about MakeMKV and Handbrake while ripping disks (& found I could run 3 DVD/BR USB 3 drives at a time while ripping disks without issue). I'm starting to get a feel for what I want to do and now know I need to take advantage of drive reduncancy. In that vein, I just received another piece of equipment. It's a TerraMaster D4-320 DAS. It connects to the F2-423 via USB 3.2 gen2 and can be configured as an extension to the NAS. It allows configuration of the DAS drives as a TRAID volume (TerraMaster version of RAID 5 but allowing efficient size mixing). Currently waiting on another 8TB Ironwolf drive before installing the DAS. In the mean time, I wiped the two HDD drives on the F2-423 (after backing up) and rebuilt them as a TRAID volume (pretty much a RAID 1). That's where things are currently. |
| I'm sure there will be questions, I have no background in NAS applications. Just thought I'd lay groundwork for what is to come. I'm still looking at the alternative apps for media sharing & trying to get a handle on things like Docker, Portainer, etc. My only Linux exposure has been with Raspberry Pi stuff & that has generally been pretty specifically focused on stuff like 3D printing & some HAM apps as opposed to general Linux file or network operations. |
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So far, so good. Got the new 8TB in so I installed it in the D4-320 DAS box, cabling that to the F2-423 NAS. As advertised, the NAS let me add the DAS drive as a new TRAID, NAS storage pool & NAS volume. It doesn't show up in the USB device listing. The drive does show in the Iron wolf health listing. Used the NAS file manager to copy the 900GB media directory into the new volume. I think I'll be using the NAS internal volume for PC backups & the external volume for media as it has the greatest storage potential. FWIW, the NAS has a benchmark function for disks. RAID volume disks only test read speeds. Where the internal volume drives are doing about 242 MB/sec the external is doing about 234 MB/sec. All HDDs are 8TB Seagate Ironwolf drives. |
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Couldn't find an app on the older Vizio tv or Dish Hopper that provided local network access. I had picked up a Fire TV 4k max half price a while back back, installed it & installed VLC. I set it up with a read only ID on the NAS. works great. Got a chance to compare quality between a video ripped straight from blue ray & the same video after handbrake compression ( roughly 7 to 1) on the tv. No real difference on a 55" screen. No performance difference. No buffering with either. Was reading from the external expansion box (D4-320). Need to do the same with a DVD video. |
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Decided to replace the 2 8TB drives on the NAS Volume2 with 2 12TB drives & move the 8TB drives to the DAS Volume3. Planning on doing it with one new drive a month til done. Just did the first one, swapping out one 8TB Seagate ironwolf with a 12TB Toshiba N300 (hot swap). TOS 6 rebuilt the volume in about 12 hours. Once that was done I added the removed 8TB to the DAS box (hot install). Told TOS 6 to add the drive to DAS Volume3. Once the drive was added, TOS 6 started the volume rebuild. No storage increase at this point, but the DAS Volume3 now has redundancy. Next month will see NAS Volume2 get expanded to 12TB from 8TB & DAS Volume3 will get expanded to 16 TB from 8TB when I swap out the remaining NAS 8TB drive with a 12TB. I picked up a permanent key for MakeMKV so I can continue with DVD/Bluray ripping without having to deal with expiring beta keys. I installed Jellyfin on the NAS to try it out. So far, just running VLC with access to the DAS media volume is actually an easier way to view videos on the fire TV stick) than Jellyfin. I am using a shared NAS folder for PC backups using Macrium Reflect (free) & the TNAS Mobile app for picture/video backups on phones & tablets. The Terramaster on-line VPN utility, TNAS mobile and Tailscale VPN app are all able to provide access via my Starlink connection. |
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Jellyfin is popular. I'm rocking plex. They have sales for the lifetime plexplass. I think I paid $79 for mine for their st patty's day sale. Plex is free. With the plex pass, it lets you do hardware decoding, skip intros, and use their plex music app. If you pay for a music subscription, then shitcanning it and using the plex music app pays for the plexpass pretty quick. Plex has native apps for pretty much everything you could possibly want to watch a movie on. |
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Originally Posted By Deuskid: What is NAS? |
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
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Originally Posted By Deuskid: What is NAS? Its a computer in your local (home/work) network who's main purpose is being storage for other computers. They are typically built with lopsided specs and form factors to fit their role. Minimal CPU and power supply. Small form factor. Primary focus is hard drives and SSDs. In addition to the physical storage, they run software that exposes their storage in a million different ways. The common ones are file storage, document sharing, self-hosting movies/TV shows, music, backing up other computers on the network, code repositories. |
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This is the setup at the house. The box on the wall is the Starlink Gen3 router. The little shelf unit below it has the NAS, DAS & UPS with associated power bricks. The DAS is the dark box on the top. It is a Terra-Master D4-320, has room for 4 SATA drives & is attached to the NAS by a USB 3.2 Gen2 connection. The NAS is the smaller silver box in the middle. It is a Terra-Master F2-423. It is running their TOS 6 operating system (based on Linux kernel 6.1 LTS). It has a Celeron N5095 quad core 64 bit processor with 20GB RAM installed (potential max is 32GB). It has room for 2 M2 NVMe drives and 2 SATA drives. It is attached to the Starlink router with a wired ethernet connection, the F2-423 has 2.5GbE ports but the Starlink router's are 1Gb. The Starlink router does WIFI for the house (along with a Starlink "mini" router mesh node). The small UPS supports all the devices. We have a standby generator so it only has to carry them for about 30 seconds in the event of an outage. Attached File |
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Made a change to the volume definitions yesterday to address an inconsistency I had observed. I was seeing the total space used amount reported for the hdd volumes failing to reflect the space that should have been recovered when the recycle folder was emptied. For example: 1.2TB used space on a volume (1TB in files, 200GB in recycle, manually verified); empty the recycle folder & total used space should now be 1TB. It was staying 1.2TB, even 12+ hours later with a verified 1TB file total and 0B in the recycle folder. From posts on the "official" forum it looked like the btrfs file system might not be adjusting free space in a timely fashion, or maybe an issue with the btrfs recycle folder implementation. On that basis, I backed up files I wanted to preserve & rebuilt the two hdd volumes using ext4 instead of btrfs. I'll do some testing & see if that took care of the issue. |
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Ran a test adding a folder with 330GB worth of files to Volume 3 shared space, which was subsequently deleted and then the recycle bin emptied. I checked properties for occupied space of the volume, folders & recycle folder at each step. Everything did what it was supposed to. Total occupied space didn't change until the recycle folder was emptied, then it dropped by the amount stored in the test folder (& later in the recycle folder). So bottom line seems to be that ext4 is a better choice than btrfs for my uses & with this (TOS6) operating system. |
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Touching base regarding updates to the NAS setup. When the D4-320 DAS was added, the F2-423 NAS had one volume made from 2 HDD, both 8TB . The DAS had one volume, consisting of just one 8TB. All HDD were Seagate Iron Wolf drives. Both volumes were defined as "TRAID" volumes, Vol2 in the NAS & Vol3 in the DAS. Once the DAS was installed, I started a "once a month" update cycle to add storage to both NAS and DAS. Each drive change resulted in the NAS requiring a period of time to adjust storage pools to the new configuration and I waited until configuration associated with a change completed before doing the next change Last month I swapped one NAS 8TB drive with a 12TB (Toshiba N300 NAS), then added that replaced 8TB to the DAS. At this point there was no change in storage capacity but the DAS now had redundancy. Each of these changes took 12 hours or so for the NAS to integrate the changes. This month I replaced the remaining 8TB in the NAS with another new 12TB drive, then installed the replaced 8TB in the DAS as it's third drive. The NAS update process was two part. First to integrate the new 12TB into the Vol2 storage pool, once that was done then the Vol2 definition could then be expanded to use the full drive capacities. This increased the Vol2 capacity to about 12TB. Both phases took a total of 24 hrs or so to complete, about half the time predicted at the start of the update. In the DAS, the 8TB drive was added to the Vol3 storage pool. This involved formatting & configuring the drive as part of the pool and took about 40 hours, which was about douible the predicted time. Once the storage pool update was finished, Vol3 was then expanded to use the increased storage. Vol3 capacity is now about 16TB. Next month's update will be to complete the filling of the DAS box by adding another 8TB drive. From then on I will be concentrating on software & data loading. |
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I've been ripping discs. I paid for a permanent key for MakeMKV so I don't have to keep updating beta keys. I'm running multiple instances, each dedicated to a specific drive (an option from the advanced options page). Currently set up with 2 blue-ray & 3 dvd usb 3 RW drives & can run all simultaneously. The mkv files are written to a local hdd with each video getting its own folder. Handbrake then does the conversion to mp4. I found a setting to allow recursive folder scanning so I don't have to select files individually. I also found I can enable Handbrake to run up to 6 worker threads so it can work on 6 files at a time. I have a decent processor & GPU, but the volume can pretty much max out the work hdd's thoughput ( per the performance page graphics) Once conversions are done I delete the mkv files & then copy the folders + files to the NAS volume. I still haven't settled on plex vs jellyfin vs whatever. I am using the convention of one folder per movie named with the movie title + year in parentheses. TV series file naming includes a tag denoting season, disc & episode on disc. The VLC app does well enough for now regarding access & play until I settle on a media server. 90+ movies loaded so far, plus 3 TV series. Barely scratched the surface regarding the overall collection. Guess it will be like eating an elephant, just one fork full at a time. |
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Plugged in the 4th (& last) 8TB drive in the D4-320 box. This allows extending the Vol3 TRAID to a nominal 24TB working space. The storage pool "organizing" process after adding the new drive to the pool took about 40 hours (estimate had been 21 hours). Once the organizing was done, extending the TRAID volume to the full capacity only took a couple of minutes. The 4 8TB drives are way overkill for the media server application as I am using Handbrake to convert the ripped .MKV files to .MP4. So far I've ripped about 380 movies & 30 tv series or miniseries with about 1500 episodes. I am about 3/4 through my collection. The vast majority have been DVD rather than blu-ray. I had added another USB 3 DVD RW, so I often rip 6 discs at a time. This has been convenient for TV series as a number of them consist of 6 discs per season. Total space used for media (movies, shows, ebooks, audio books) is about 1.25 TB so far. Storing Uncompressed video would probably have put that at 10+ TB. I may end up swapping Vol2 & Vol3 uses. Vol2 (nominal 12TB) currently houses the daily PC backup versions & often fills up enough before the weekly auto empty of the recycle folder, that I have to do that manually to recover space. I'll have to decide on that before proceeding with the media server app install. Still haven't settled on Plex or Jellyfin. |
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Just an aside, I've got the USB readers stacked on a couple of 3D printed racks on workspace by the PC, secured with servo tape. It makes access easier. The blu-ray readers have built in USB 3 hubs & that's where the DVD readers get plugged in. About half the drives also have external power (via USB chargers). Attached File |
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Originally Posted By nikdfish: Should be able to. Both the Terra master remote access VPN & tail scale VPN worked fine when I tested them with my phone. As I recall, both involve making the connection via an external site. I suppose if you are remote VPN back to your router from your phone. But can you reach your media player on your Nas from your phone without VPN? Plex uses an indirect proxy, which does not like cellular. |
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Originally Posted By belted_guns: I suppose if you are remote VPN back to your router from your phone. But can you reach your media player on your Nas from your phone without VPN? Plex uses an indirect proxy, which does not like cellular. So far I have only used local copies of VLC for file based media viewing as opposed to an app specific media player. |
| A side note; I use the M2 based Vol1 as a system disk (roughly 1TB capacity but only about 1% in use). I added NAS duple backup tasks that do backups of it to each of the 2 HDD volumes. I also added a duple backup task backing up the /home folder (located on Vol2 ) to Vol3. Eventually I will add an external USB drive for another layer of redundancy for stored media. |
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Originally Posted By nikdfish: A side note; I use the M2 based Vol1 as a system disk (roughly 1TB capacity but only about 1% in use). I added NAS duple backup tasks that do backups of it to each of the 2 HDD volumes. I also added a duple backup task backing up the /home folder (located on Vol2 ) to Vol3. Eventually I will add an external USB drive for another layer of redundancy for stored media. You will need to test your backup recovery strategy. Or at the very least, detailed instructions on how to recover. Why? Because you will crash your nas. Enjoy it. We love having all our media available and not relying on discs. |
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Doing a batch of blu-ray currently, Game of Thrones seasons 1-6. I needed access to the on-disc menu to ID episodes on the first one. VLC would not show the blu-ray menu, fussing about not finding Java & that was required to show the menu, even though Java is on the machine & working OK with a minecraft server (using OpenJDK ver Zulu22) . Finding a fix was a pain in the butt, but finally got it squared away. If you run into this when using VLC to play a blu-ray, here is a checklist. (I haven't verified all are needed, but the combo worked for me) 1. ensure that VLC & Java are for the same platform - x86 vs. x64 2. create environment variables if not present -- JAVA_HOME and JRE_HOME & point to the level just above the .bin folder (for me: C:\Program Files\Java\jdk-12.0.2 ) 3. include the java.exe location in the system path variable, including reference to the .bin folder. I.E. include "%JAVA_HOME%\bin" in the path. I had to place this after the zulu22 reference to keep minecraft happy. 4. if necessary, install a Java version known to work OK with VLC. I installed Oracle ver 12.0.2 & placed it's path in the variables as it was the latest version I found referenced on line as working with VLC. Also make sure VLC open media/disc page has blu-ray selected and that the "no disc menus" box is not checked. |
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Got Jellyfin running. 490+ movies, 30+ TV series - miniseries. I used the Terramaster house app package, a quick install but not very friendly about changing the baked in directory assignments for metadata. Not without a few hiccups. I triggered a "scan all libraries" event with all the above referenced media in place & it brought the NAS to it's knees. Ended up with an M2 drive issuing overheat warnings & the box became pretty much non-responsive to the web interface. Don't know if I triggered the shut down (which I was attempting) or it shut itself down. Restarted & things seemed OK, though. Attached File Attached File Found a few videos/series that took some name editing to get properly recognized. Had to append IMDB ID numbers to a couple. There are a few that show up as duplicates/multipless. All duplicates for an item show the same file & path info, so don't know why it is happening. Working OK via the Fire TV stick & PC. Haven't tried on tablet or phone yet. |
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Jellyfin can now provide access to my audio book library. It did take a bit of manual editing of metadata, but finally got it set up where series items display in order,with grouping by series within author. Need to reinstall Tailscale on the NAS so I can check out remote jellyfin access. I have the account set up already from some earlier playing around. ETA: reinstalled the tailscale app on the NAS & reauthenticated it. Connected to jellyfin on the PC via the tailscale assigned NAS IP & it worked. I moved the phone to the guest network (blocks access to devices on main network) then connected to jellyfin with the tail scale IP for the NAS. everything worked fine. Was able to play a movie, just a bit of lag before starting but played smoothly even when jumping ahead on the timeline. |
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I installed the TM surveillance camera app & tried it out with a cheap ($30) ONVIF compatible ptz camera I picked up on amazon. Adding it was very simple as it showed on th discovery list. All I had to do was enter the userid & password assigned to the camera during its setup. The PTZ function does not not work in the app but the phone app can still activate it. It is set for recording so I'll let it run for a bit & see how the the product looks after a day or so. I may end up using it to cover some of our current NVR blindsposts. ETA. The Starlink router lets you block internet access for a given device so you can restrict a camera to the local network & keep it from phoning home. |
| Guess I'm lazy, I just have two folders called A-L and M-Z and inside each are 100's of movie folders with their file inside which I use Kodi to play. Simple for me, but I don't play them outside my house. |
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
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Once again impressed with the Starlinnk Gen 3 router wifi. I ended up adding 4 wifi cameras around the perimeter of the house, getting recorded via the NAS app. (3 of the 4 are Tapo outdoor PTZ cams with no visible antenna) This is supplimenting the 4 camera wifi NVR we've had for years. Zero problems with the new cameras getting connected, positioned on all four sides of the house. It's 2700 sf, brick construction, with the Starlink router mounted on a wall in the loft. The NVR has had connection issues in the past with it's cameras in much much closer proximity. Pics from the new cams via a TV app. Attached File |