I THINK I need - or at least want - a NAS system for my home. I’ve read here and there about them, still no expert, but I know there are people here who are.
What I want to do:
Have a secure backup location for my notebook and my wife’s.
Store a lot of data that I use occasionally but not so often that data has to be on my notebook’s HDs.
Have a way to store “stuff” that my wife and I can access easily, with some organization. For example, we have a LOT of family photos spread between my wife’s computer and mine. I’d like to have these on the NAS, with, for example, folders that say’s “Wife’s Photos,’” “My Photos”, etc. and have those easy enough to access that my tech challenged wife can easily store them and access them.
The same for various other data, with the ability to make some of it fairly open and some of it hidden/password protected (e.g. tax data, medical records, etc.)
Store all of our music and be able to easily play it through our receiver. (including my wife being able to) - almost like having a big jukebox.
A place to store all of our ripped DVDs (we have a big library!) and purchased movies and TV shows and play them on any of our 3 TVs (Den, bedroom, sunroom) - I currently do that via Plex and store the media on my notebook, but I don’t have room to store everything, and if my wife wants to watch something and I’m not home and my notebook’s not home, she can’t do that.
Anything else that a NAS can do that I’m not smart enough to know about.
I’d like to keep it under $500 if possible. Also, if it makes any difference, I have an Orbi + Orbi satellite as my internet wireless system, internet service is a pretty solid 100 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up.
I recently bought a Synology DS216Play. It’s pretty good. It does all of the above, except 6. You can store ripped DVDs on there and the ‘Video Station’ app will read DVD .isos, but it has no way to rip them.
The NAS part is easy–heck, if you are running PLEX you are already running an NAS of sorts. There are lots of ways, mostly Unix-based in one form or another, and most have very accessible GUIs.
The bigger issue I see is trying to keep it to $500 and yet having drives big enough to store DVDs, music, photos, etc., as well as presumably RAIDing the thing, for safety of storage. That’s going to take a LOT of drive space.
Another Synology user, a DS415, and as Pod said, it will do everything you want. The biggest problem I hear about with most models is that the processors aren’t good enough to decode video for playback (something I don’t do). So video needs to be decoded first (or use Plex on it).
It isn’t cheap though, $500 including drives might be pushing it. You might be able to find a cheaper 2 drive model of course.
Well, if i have to go more than $500 to do what I want and need and do it right, so be it. I certainly don’t want to spend $500 and not be able to serve my needs.
Plex beta versions support Intel Quicksync, so there’s a strong possibility that more powerful NAS devices with intel atom CPUs will be capable of transcoding at some point. I wouldn’t buy one for that purpose that doesn’t work today, though. The Q-NAP below says it handles transcoding, but I don’t know if it works with Plex yet.
Anyway, any NAS will do what you list in your post. The Wirecutter’s recommendation (linked below) is $250 and then you need to buy two drives. That comes in at $506.
I hear Q-NAP is great but I personally love my Synology. I also suggest spending the extra money to get a 4-bay NAS, that way you get more storage for your money. With 2 4TB drives mirrored, your NAS will only have 4TB of space. With 4 4TB drives in RAID, you will have 12TB.
The Synology or QNAP NAS devices will do exactly what you want. BUT that $500 is way too low since you need to fill the bays in your frame with drives.
A few thoughts:
Get enough bays to do what you want. 2 will let you mirror the storage, but will limit your storage to the capacity of one drive. 3 will let you start with RAID 5 (or the vendor-proprietary versions of same) and you’ll get approximately the storage space of 2 drives. More bays and you can do more storage and more complex schemes like RAID 10 (mirrored striped sets)
RAID IS NOT BACKUP. I can’t say this enough. Having redundant / safe data does not equal being able to recover files from any point in time or being able to recover the NAS from an array crash. You want a backup of the NAS, even if it’s just an external USB drive doing a nightly backup of the NAS.
Depending on your tech level, consider the quality of the management tools. You could build your own Linux NAS or buy one of the pre-built ones. IMO the Synology devices have better / easier GUIs that will shield you from messing with the UNIX command line if you don’t want to.
If the roku can play ISO files off a SMB (windows) file mount with no changes, you don’t need to transcode at all. Transcoding is primarily useful when playing video on a cellphone, including outside your house over the internet.
I have to admit I don’t understand it all since I don’t do it (although I have tried to stream an MKV and it didn’t work too well), but from podcasts I have listened to, people want to rip Blurays into higher quality MKVs that then need to be transcoded to stream on your Roku, etc. Most cheaper Synologys do not have a powerful enough processor to do this.
If you install Plex, somehow it helps with this supposedly?
Yeah, I kinda get Plex (though not enough to really know how to tweak it!) Essentially, with Plex on my laptop, if the movie I want to play has the correct format, for what I’m playing it on, Plex will use Directplay and just stream it directly from the server (my notebook) to the TV.
But if the format needs to be changed or transcoded to something else, it will try to do that on the fly. If the transcoding is faster than the streaming, cool, no problem, you don’t notice. But if the hardware can’t do it fast enough, you get the dreaded “Circle of buffering” on the screen, as you play some then it pauses to catch up with the transcoding.
Memory doesn’t matter unless you want to run other stuff on the NAS. You can run Plex Media Server on the NAS itself, for example. But until it transcodes, you probably don’t want to do that. And even then, 1GB is fine unless you load up other servers. Some people run webservers, mailservers, ventrilo, etc, on their NAS. You need more memory to do that stuff. With the Q-NAP models, you can upgrade the RAM yourself if you need it.
Regarding the 2 versus 4 node NAS, you can buy a 4-node model (which costs an extra $100) and put 2 disks in it. Then when you want to add storage later on, you can slot in new disks to add to the array.
In this case even though I personally prefer Synology, the Q-Nap has an intel CPU so it might work with Plex hardware transcoding in the future. It’s probably a better bet.
I really love the synology UI. It’s ridiculously slick.
NAS is not the least expensive solution, nor is it the technically superior solution. Setting up your own FreeNAS box with ZFS is that. But it requires a ton of upkeep and is generally a pain in the ass. You could build a computer with windows, RAID the drives, and share them too. But again, windows needs to update and reboot, and it isn’t easy. A dedicated NAS just works. It isn’t a computer you mess around with. It’s a storage box that you access externally.
$350 is probably cheap enough to just go for a 4-bay, but it sure seems like it will be hard to fill up. I want to rip maybe 80 DVDs and store about 300 GB of pictures and miscellaneous backup. I don’t listen to music and I rarely watch movies. I can’t see how I’d use 12TB unless I became spoiled by the ripped DVDs and decided to do it with our small Blu-ray collection.
I want something easy for now. The nice thing is if I ever want to build a dedicated multi-purpose box, these things are cheap enough I won’t feel bad about moving on.
I probably want to run CrashPlan on it to upload to their servers unless I can get that all done from my main PC while it’s not in use. Google indicates that’s possible but it takes some effort.
