Performance for Mini-PC with external HDD via USB or Synology

Playground Hardware
#1

I'm currently running Channels on a Bee-Link mini PC attached to a portable 4TB HDD via USB.
I just inherited a Synology I've been meaning to play around with.

Can anyone tell me how a Synology and more generally NAS would typically perform as far as storage for the DVR content compared to a USB connected disk? I was assuming at least for the compute portion (transcoding, etc.) the beelink would perform better than hosting the whole service on the NAS, but if I were to use the NAS just as the storage for the DVR content mounted with SMB on the beelink, would that performance be comparable or better than using an external HDD?

#2

What model Synology?

#3

The access time on the SMB would be faster than USB.
The use of Channels on the Synology would be a downgrade.
Most of these mini pcs have more memory out of the box compared to the disk station depending on what you have.
The intel based Synology i have runs my channels appplications very nicely.
The memory upgrade i added last year has made a difference. I should have done it long aago.

#4

The only downside to running CDVR on your Bee-Link and recording via an SMB share on the Synology is that temp files and cache files also go to the Synology (mainly the ./Streaming/ and ./Logs/ directories) unless you use defined docker shares or use symlinks to keep those on the Bee-Link.

My gigabit ethernet attached Synology will just about saturate the network connection, reading/writing at over 100MB/sec (that's over 800Mb/sec).

#5

My setup is close to what you are asking about:

  • Beelink N100 running Windows 11 Pro
  • Home built NAS running Unraid

Components chosen to be low power consumption such as SATA SSDs for my recordings. If you have spinning disks for your recordings then they can't spin down as Channels DVR regularly access it's files. You don't need much bandwidth as even a 4K recording maxes out at about 25Mb/sec. You can fit a lot huge number of them on a 1-Gb Ethernet and the Beelink comes with 2.5Gb of your switch and NAS support it.

My experience is very snappy. The N100 is not the fastest at commercial skipping taking about 8 minutes for an hour recording. For me this rarely matters as I tend not to watch recordings right after they record. If you start to watch right after recording, then the commercial skipping is usually done before most of the commercial breaks and you can always fast forward.

The N100 is surprisingly capable. I run both Channels DVR and Plex on the main Windows install. Via Hyper-V I run a VM with my network management as well as my backup aucustrator. With all of this, everything is snappy.