Upgrading My Plex Server With a new TerraMaster NAS and Seagate IronWolf Pro Drives!

How Much Does it Cost?

Well, it’s not a cheap setup, that’s for sure, but what it is is modular, scalable and surprisingly accessible. The setup I have is a TerraMaster F5-221 NAS 5 Bay NAS, it’s the Intel Dual Core version, and it’s currently £349.99 here in the UK and $379.99 in the US. That’s very competitive, and one of the best prices you’ll find for a 5-bay NAS. However, you can get the same hardware in a 2-bay configuration for just £239.99 too.

The hard drive configuration was a 5 x 14TB Seagate IronWolf Pro. These are big and expensive NAS drives and are likely overkill for many. However, I will remind you that while mine is formatted as 5 x 14TB drives, I actually have a single 14TB, three 16TB and an 18TB in the system as it’s what was available at the time and I’ll be replacing both the 14TB and the 18TB with appropriate matching 16TB drives in the future as that will give me an additional 10TB of storage. However, this matched formatting is only true for RAID configurations, you could use JBOD configurations to use all the drives as is, but this offers no failsafe for your data. You could even start with 3 drives in RAID4, and add one more and migrate it to RAID5, then another, as funds become available to you over time.

Check for up-to-date drive prices here.

• Seagate 4 TB IronWolf Pro – £123
• Seagate 6 TB IronWolf Pro – £170
• Seagate 10 TB IronWolf Pro – £285
• Seagate 12 TB IronWolf Pro – £310
• Seagate 14 TB IronWolf Pro – £315
• Seagate 16 TB IronWolf Pro – £335
• Seagate 18 TB IronWolf Pro – £439

Overview

As you can see above, the NAS, plus five drives are going to add up to quite a bit. My 5 x 14TB configuration could cost around just under £2000 once fully setup. Of course, this is a pretty hard-core family streaming hub setup and 50TB of high-speed storage on your home network may not be what you need. The 2 Bay configuration with a pair of 6TB drives could get the price down to just £500-600, and would still store a heck of a lot of movies.

Out With the Old

I ran a dual 6 TB setup for many years, and for streaming to the kids bedrooms and watching a movie on an evening, it was more than sufficient for those years. However, these days, I work from home, my partner works from home and remotely, there’s a teenager and a pre-teen in the house, both like to watch plenty of classic TV shows, and they like their movies too. We have more 4K displays in the house, so more 4K rips mean more data to put through the network. There are more mobile phones and tablets in the house these days too, and we all run Plex Amp to stream music around the house, at school, in the car, and even at friends’ houses. Throw in a few occasional family users who also use our Plex, and suddenly, the need for a more potent 5-bay NAS becomes clear.

In With the New

What scale is right for you is hard to say, and dropping £2000 on a big NAS is likely out of the budget for most home users just wanting to stream their own movies to a single TV. Of course, a NAS is basically a little computer in its own right, and mass storage has other uses beyond having somewhere to store all your ripped CDs. You can use the TerraMaster desktop and mobile applications to back up your devices, store your phone’s photos, and even as your own personal and private cloud server. Not everyone wants to use Amazon or Google for storage, so this is a nice bonus. With the latest TOS 5.0 firmware, the NAS now supports Docker, allowing for a host of software customisation options for advanced users too, albeit the learning curve is a little steep on that front for my liking.

Plex

Plex has been great so far, it’s been a staple of our home media consumption for many years now. The latest NAS from TerraMaster is far from their most powerful, but it’s proven more than capable when it comes to acting as a Plex server. I would have liked to have gotten one with a more potent quad-core CPU and more RAM, and now looking back, more potent networking speeds such as a 2.5GbE. However, it’s not like I’ve run into issues with what I have. Transcoding works well, and at-home or remote streaming users have had no issues either, so it seems it was money well saved.

Should I Buy One?

If you’re looking for a great entry into the world of building your own home media server, the TerraMaster F5-221 NAS is a fantastic option. Pair that with a set of the truly awesome Seagate IronWolf Pro drives, and you’ll have all the storage and performance you could ask for! One thing is for certain though, this has been a huge upgrade over my previous setup!