berwhale

Unfortunately, there's an issue with many motherboards, including the one in the N54L, where the BIOS data get's reset to defaults if you enable scheduled startup. It's something to do with the the way that DSM writes the data to the BIOS. viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3289

What's the difference in power consumption between the N54L and an AsusStor? Let's assume it's 50W (I think it will actually be considerably less) and do a power calculation for the UK... 50w x 24 hours x 30 days per month = 36kWh per month. I pay around 12p per kWh for electricity, so 36kWh = £4.32 per month to run. N54L can currently be purchased for £130 from eBuyer. 4 bay AsusStor (ASUSTOR AS-204T) is around £270. So purchase price differential is £140. £140 divided by £4.32 = 32.4 months = 2 years and 8 months before the lower power consumption gets you any benefit.

It looks like it's an issue with the N54L's BIOS, lots of discussion here... viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3289

Yepp, a UPS is essential. I have one of these, it's automatically recognized by DSM and works well... http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B002RXED6A/r ... 71_TE_item That reminds me, I must set up the software to shutdown my 2nd server as well

Make sure you have DirectPlay enabled and set the bit rate to the maximum on your Plex client to stop it transcoding.

Hi, I just noticed that Antivirus Essential has quarantined 4 files from the Python install on DSM. The files are: wininst-9.0.exe @appstore/python/lib/putjon2.7/site-packages/distutils2/command wininst-8.0.exe @appstore/python/lib/putjon2.7/site-packages/distutils2/command wininst-9.0.exe @appstore/python/lib/putjon2.7/distutils/command wininst-8.0.exe @appstore/python/lib/putjon2.7/distutils/command The virus is listed as: Win.Worm.Chir-551 and Win.Worm.Chir-553 However, it looks like it might be a false positive: http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic ... 90&t=88086 http://lurker.clamav.net/message/201407 ... bd.en.html

Errrrrr? Ethernet is a collection of standards pertaining to wired, local area networks; '4G' is a marketing term used to flog mobile phones.

I found this out today, so I thought I'd make a note of it here: You can use the following command whilst logged into the DSM shell as root... cat /proc/bus/usb/devices

I think it depends if you're transcoding to stream or transcoding to sync. If it's for syncing, then you'd want Plex to do it a quickly as possible and max out the CPU, if it's for streaming, you'd want Plex to work fast enough to keep the buffer full - if it has to max the CPU to keep the buffer full, then you've got no headroom for multiple streams or higher bit rate conversion in the future. As for my own requirements, I really don't need to transcode. I have a fairly long commute by train, so I copy MKVs to USB drive and play them directly on my phone or tablet (I have a double ended USB drive which make this pretty painless: http://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-SDDD-06 ... ndisk+dual)

Yes, you need a custom BIOS (otherwise, the ODD and eSATA ports run in IDE emulation mode - they're slow and you can only use one of them at a time) These work a treat in the ODD bay... http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/info_3996.html You'll also need a molex to dual SATA power adapter.

The irony for me is that Microsoft drove me to look at alternatives to Windows Server, like Xpenology by cancelling their Technet subscription service. Thank you Mr. Ballmer! I hope Synology realize that by giving lots of techies the opportunity to play wtih DSM for free, they're going to get a lot more sales when those techies recommend Synology to their friends and families.

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Can you see Plex listed when you do an 'ls'?

I humbly disagree with this. The CPU will max out, but my N40L transcodes at 3-4x - the poor bugger managed to serve three streams over the web anyway (although I think that they were 720p). But yes, use direct play when you can! Maxing the CPU out for prolonged periods is 'struggling' in my book! But you're right, the N54L will handle some transcoding work. My N36L was sometimes OK with 720p, but 1080p was out of the question - although I must admit that generally my media has a fairly high bit rate.

Surely everyone has moved to custom silicon by now?

The Plex Chromecast forum would be a more appropriate place to ask that question. See the link I posted previously.

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3052&p=20369&hilit=nanoboot+upgrade#p20369

See sig.

Sorry dtran, I've lost my power meter. I might buy another one soon as I'm interested to know the numbers as well! P.S. I looked into the Kabini APU/AM1 motherboard combo as an option for Xpenology. It didn't appear to offer anywhere like the power efficiency/peformance of the latest Intel CPUs. The fact that the AMD APU has a half decent GPU on-board is of no benefit here.

Fair enough, but I still don't see much point making the array that resilient without the rest of the system to match - have you considered other high availability technologies like ECC RAM, teamed NICs, redundant PSUs and HA clusters in your solution? RAID 10 isn't going to give you five 9's uptime on it's own you know.

If you look at post #9 you'll see instructions for deleting just the 'Plex' shared folder. You probably don't want to delete the whole volume, but if you do... !!!!THIS WILL DELETE THE VOLUME AND ALL THE DATA ON IT!!!! Go to Storage Manager, click on Volume, select the volume and click Remove. You'll then need to create a new volume.

Why on Earth do you want to run RAID10? Do you really need that level of performance and availability? You may get better results combining an SHR array with an SSD. There's a post on here somewhere detailing an ESXi setup with this config. *edit* this one: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3132&hilit=esxi+guide

Couple of points... 1. The N54L will struggle with realtime transcoding, especially if it's 1080p content. 2. My Chromecast plays pretty much all of my 720/1080p content via DirectPlay (without transcoding). Have you checked out the Plex forum for tips on how to optimize playback to ChromeCast? https://forums.plex.tv/index.php/forum/ ... hromecast/

I considered building something with a similar specs to the Gen8 - I have an N36L G7 and I know just how slow transcoding can be! I found the following parts... Nice B85 mATX board with 6 SATA ports http://www.dabs.com/products/gigabyte-b ... -93LC.html Low power Haswell Celeron (35W TDP): http://www.watercoolinguk.co.uk/p/Intel ... 46058.html In the end, I decided that I have no real need to transcode, so why pay for the horsepower and electricity to power it? So, I decided to upgrade one of my HTPCs with a Gigabyte J1800 mobo and move the existing board into a new NAS (see sig.)

Agree with Schnapps; I just built the server in my sig and it's very responsive, even with a 1.1Ghz, passively cooled Celeron in it. Plex runs much faster than on my old HP Microserver running WHS2011, although that's not saying too much as it's an N36L. BTW, the MSI C847MS-E33 was originally in a Home Theatre PC running PlexHT. I put a Gigabyte GA-J1800N-D2H motherboard in the HTPC moved the old one to the server. This saved me from buying a more expensive J1800/1900 board with 4x SATA ports at a relatively small sacrifice in performance and overall power draw (17W vs 10W TDP for the CPUs).