Ideally it would run: 1) Cloud backup (Backblaze B2) 2) Plex media server (w/ Hardware acceleration) 3) PiHole 4) Unifi Controller
I believe I have narrowed it down to the Synology DS720+ or the Qnap 253be. However, it seems like this tech is still a little fragile. For example, the Synology requires some tweaking for hardware encoding to work due to a bad driver.
I can deal with a longer setup as long as the result is as bullet proof as my Unifi AC Pro access point (which has literally run for years without an outage or glitch).
Appreciate any advice... including other options that include just avoid it all together.
However, even their biggest boxes don’t have a great deal of CPU power, because for serving storage you don’t need that much CPU. And you don’t want to overload them with apps and containers at the cost of hurting their primary purpose.
In your case, I might be inclined to do the storage part with a Synology NAS, and then add on a separate server component to handle the more CPU-intensive operations and have it access the Synology NAS over the network.
I do also like FreeNAS, and you can install it on hardware you build yourself, or you can buy one of the TrueNAS Mini configurations (see https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/). I’m definitely planning on going this route for my next home NAS.
Another advantage of this approach is that you’ll be forced to learn exactly how your redundant storage works. I was always worried that if the Synology device failed, I’d have to go out and buy the latest model and hope that it was able to read the hard disks from the failed device. Since all I did was click through the Synology GUI to set those disks up, I had no idea whether I’d be able to read them on another device.
You could build a far more powerful NAS yourself than you can buy from Synology or the like but I appreciate that not everyone has the time or interest.