I’ve been running my new home media server setup for about two months now, and it’s been surprisingly stable. I give you a quick update in my latest video.
The core of the setup is a GMKTec G9 NVMe NAS, along with a Wavlink USB drive enclosure that connects four SATA drives through a single USB cable. After shooting the initial video, I moved it off my desk and into a closet where it’s been running nonstop—with no reboots until yesterday morning, when I updated it to Unraid 7.1 (compensated affiliate link).
The new Unraid update addressed a key issue I’d been dealing with: Plex hardware transcoding wasn’t functional due to the kernel in the prior version not supporting Intel N150 quicksync hardware video transcoding. I can confirm with 7.1 installed, hardware video transcoding is now working.
I thought it might be plug-and-play with Plex, but it required a small tweak. Inside the Docker settings for the Plex container, I added a new device pointing to /dev/dri to enable GPU support. Once that was in place, the container rebooted, and everything was good to go.
To verify it, I played a 4K Blu-ray rip of Back to the Future on my phone. Plex was compressing it down to 1080p at 8Mbps, and both decoding and encoding were showing as hardware-accelerated. The N150 handled tone mapping and HEVC encoding without much CPU load—only around 8% usage. The result was a smooth playback experience and a crispy clear image on the phone.
This update gave me enough confidence to finally retire my old WD My Cloud PR2100, which had been serving media for nearly a decade but couldn’t handle newer 4K HEVC files.
Unraid has been a great choice for this kind of DIY setup. I like that I can move the drives and configuration to new hardware without much rework. The rig itself isn’t particularly pretty—certainly not a polished all-in-one unit like a Synology—but if you’re okay managing things yourself, the flexibility is hard to beat. I’ve got another NAS box coming in from Beelink soon and may try migrating the setup over just to see how that goes.
I’m always interested to hear how others are building and running their Unraid boxes—sometimes the best ideas come from seeing what other people are doing with their setups. Drop a comment on the video and let me know! Check out my other videos in this series to see more.
Disclosure: The GMKTec NAS came in free of charge from the manufacturer, and the drive enclosure came in free of charge from the Amazon Vine program. No other compensation was received and nobody review or approved my video or this post before publication.