Our Media Server
In 2017, we purchased a Synology DS716+II along with two Seagate IronWolf 8 TB hard drives, which we set up in the NAS as mirrored drives using RAID 1. Our plan was to store all our FLAC music, movies, photos, and more on it. We also installed the Plex Media Server app. Everything worked well on the DS716+II for several years, but eventually, one of the IronWolf hard drives failed.
We risked our media by not immediately replacing the hard drive that failed. Time passed by, and replacing the failed drive became a low priority as everything was ‘fine’ for a few years.
We started having issues with the working hard drive in our Synology DS716+II, lots of read errors etc. on both drives, we put the failed drive back in the DS716+II, then ran some tests on the drives, and the tests confirmed the drives were failing, one was far worse than the other, which was expected. We replaced our two failed hard drives with a 14TB IronWolf Pro that we purchased from Amazon.
When we installed the 14 TB drive, the NAS refused to recognise it, so no luck trying to install the system onto it. We then tried another hard drive, and it too went unrecognised. Tested the 14 TB drive in a USB hard drive enclosure, no issues, it worked perfectly. The only logical explanation was that the NAS wasn’t getting enough power. With no drives installed, the NAS powered on and made all the right noises.
So we ordered the HKY power supply, knowing we could return it if necessary. This new power supply isn’t being returned. This HKY power supply solved all our issues; the 14 TB drive was immediately recognised in the Synology NAS, allowing installation of the DSM software. Turns out only one of the ‘faulty’ drives was actually faulty. A lot of the issues were down to the original Synology power supply. At the time we purchased the HKY power supply, it was £34.99, which we consider to be money well spent. If you have a Synology NAS that requires this sort of power supply, we can recommend the following PSU:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BPLKBPS9
Whilst we replaced the failing drives, we copied all the data on the drives to some of our other NAS units, which was done across our network; this took quite some time. Since we knew we were vulnerable to losing all our media, and that photos were irreplaceable, while music and movies were replaceable. The music and movies would take a fair bit of effort to replace, so we started to look into creating a backup system.
Backing Up Our Media
We had a Raspberry Pi 5, an innovative single-board computer (SBC) that offered impressive processing power in a compact design. Attached to it was an NVMe storage drive, elegantly mounted on a HAT (Hardware Attached on Top) that we had repurposed from a previous project.
This setup enabled us to leverage the high-speed capabilities of the NVMe, which is perfect for fast booting times and no risk of issues with TF cards.
We particularly like the following components to create our RPi 5 systems:
- Geekworm X1001 M.2 KEY-M NVMe SSD Shield for Raspberry Pi 5
- GeeekPi Armor Lite V5 Aluminium Heatsink with PWM Fan, Raspberry Pi 5 Compatible, 30mm Cooling Fan, Thermal Pads for Raspberry Pi 5 4GB/8GB
We like that the shield/HAT only covers part of the cooling fan and heat sink, which helps keep temperatures down.
For our OpenMediaVault backup system, we used a Raspberry Pi 5 4Gb. For the boot drive, we used the following:
The other additional components we used were:
- 2.5G USB to Ethernet Adapter, 2-IN-1 USB-C to RJ45 LAN Wired Network 100/1000/2500Mbps ULT-WIIQ USB C Ethernet 2.5Gb Adapter, USB C to RJ45 2.5Gb LAN Adaptor
- RSHTECH Powered USB 3.0 Hub Aluminum 10 Port USB 3.0 Data Hub with 12V/3A (36W) Power Adapter and Individual On/Off Switches & LED (RSH-A10)
- Seagate Expansion Desktop 6TB, External Hard Drive, USB 3.0, Data Rescue Services (STKP6000400)
We already had a couple of USB 3.0 hard drives, so we purchased another so that the current capacity is just over 14Tb
The additional USB Ethernet adapter connects to our second LAN and plugs into the USB 3.0 hub.
The USB hub is powered, as are the external USB hard drives, which provide us with a simple route to expanding the storage capacity of this backup system. We are using the mergerfs plugin for OpenMediaVault, which means we can add to the pool of hard drives and access this as a single volume.
We have our external USB hard drives stacked horizontally. This purchase might seem a little odd, but we consider these feet to be beneficial in lowering hard drive temperatures and thus possibly extending the life expectancy of the hard drives:
We chose to use OpenMediaVault because it is open-source software, meaning it is free for anyone to use. It is based on Debian Linux and is well-supported, with the ability to be configured/expanded using plugins. It has a webpage interface that is easy to understand, it offers many software features such as SSH, (S)FTP, SMB/CIFS, DAAP media server, RSync, BitTorrent client and more.
Here is a link to the OpenMediaVault page, where you can find out all about the project.
For our installation of OpenMediaVault on a Raspberry Pi 5, we used this guide; however, it should work for any Linux system.
Because of the issues we had with hard drives in the Synology NAS that stores our media, we started to investigate software alternatives to PLEX, which we had running on our DS716+II unit. As we didn’t like the direction, the PLEX software was heading, i.e. a paid model.
On this page, we’ll go over the solution we installed to replace PLEX.
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