Although @tmm1 doesn’t recommend J1900 CPU (due to age of chip) in his latest post “NAS Recommendations”:
Another viable (low priced) 4bay NAS from Qnap:
The TS-451+ does use the older J1900 chipset
I was looking to build a "Hackintosh Mini" so I got an older HP8300 USDT business machine on eBay (10"x10"x3"). It came with an i5-3475s, 8G RAM, a 128G SSD, and a 256G HDD. It was $170 shipped. It has turned out to be a great machine for Channels DVR. I just plugged in a portable USB 3.0 drive I already had for the recordings. There are lot of these HP8300 machines - and also the Dell Optiplex 7010/9010 machines - out there on eBay and Amazon for less than $200. Mine came with Win 10 and I added OSX to it. But you can run them with anything you want. I was going to get a new Intel NUC but this seemed like a better option and - so far - it has worked out very well. And you can also choose the other form factors for these - SFF, Mini-Tower, or Regular-Tower.
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What is the speed of the NIC on these ?
The HP8300 has an Intel 82579LM Gigabit card. But I actually just use a $20 Wifi Range Extender (with an Ethernet port) because we don't have a wired connection in the room where the machine lives. I get about 70 mbps which is more than enough.
Just thought I would update the status of my channels build as it is pretty unique and I want people to know it can be done.
My Server is currently running on an HP DL360e Gen8 server. Virtualized Windows 10 using ESXI as the hyper visor. I am passing my Nvidia Quadro p2000 through to the VM.
My storage is being shared from my FreeNas server over the network.
I just ran a test 3 local Apple TVs, 4 remote ios devices, and 1 remote Apple TV. Everything was smooth.
If anyone has questions let me know.
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I've been using Channels now for short while. I am happy and staying. I cancelled my Cable TV service with Cox after 20+ years including 15+ years of HDHomeRun legacy and Extends plus 10+ years with 3x HDHomerun Primes setup with BeyondTV (old throw back for those that know SnapStream) and WMC when Cox went full DRM. We are a household family of 5 and we watch a lot of TV.
For Channels setup, I've been using a Synology 1813+ 4GB ram and 36TB storage. works well, but I also use this NAS as my backup storage for the house. (we/I am a data hoarder for pics and media). I have been able to record 4-5 TVE streams simultaneously with no real issue to note. I'm just concerned of overworking it when 9TBs of data backups are happening.
So, I traded some old server equipment for a used QNAP TS-253Be-2G unit. I upgraded it to 16GB ram with 2x 6TB Raid-1 Iron Wolf drives. I plan on using this as my Channels DVR server with no other purposes.
Can I expect this QNAP to perform well for my needs? is there something I should setup/config to get better performance?
Any helpful suggestions are welcomed.
here is some info on QNAP ....
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Thank you, I've already setup Channels properly on the QNAP with firmware 5.0 and did a few test runs. I looked around the forum for a bit to ensure I was not completely blind-sided. I saw a few references for the QNAP 251+/451+ models so I was a little bit confident.
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For anyone looking for cheap solutions I suggest ebay! I got my channels DVR running on an HP prodesk 400 G4 I was able to snag on ebay for $90. Has a 7th gen intel pentium with quicksync and 8gb of ram it came with. I threw a m.2 in for boot and am using a 4tb usb3 drive I had laying around. Works great!
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I just started using Channels on a Synology DS220+ with 10GB RAM and it works way better than my old setup, which was a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB RAM.
What HDD are you using with your DS220+?
Different NAS (I use asustor) but I have Seagate Enterprise Exos x16 7200rpm. I have had very good luck with. Never had a failure. I haven'tbhad I/O issues.
Good bang for buck on storage. $16.50 per TB on Amazon right now. I currently have 5 EXOS drives between 2 devices.
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I have a 2TB Firecuda hybrid drive installed at the moment. Planning on buying two 10 TB
Seagate Exos 7E10 drives at some point.