Just wondering if I can get some help if possible, had a search of the forum but couldn’t find anything. At the moment my Plex server is on my 2015 Macbook pro, my films are on a external HDD of which plex is pointing to. All is working well, but it’s just a little inconvinent having to start my laptop, attatch the HDD etc etc just to watch a film. It’d be nice to have a dedicated drive that’s on all the time so that any of my family can load their laptop up, or smart tv etc and they can watch easily.
So, what device could I use that would be good for this? I’d like some sort of cloud drive where I can transfer files from my laptop to the drive without having to physically plug the two device together, i’d just be able to drag and drop through finder.
Most of my files are 1080P/4K files, so a device that could play and stream 4K files over Plex would be great.
Any suggestions would be great, was looking at the Western Digital My Cloud drive but would this be sufficient for me?
Generally speaking, you’re looking in the right direction.
A NAS can both store your media and run Plex Media Server on it. The WD MyCloud is a nice product but it’s very restricted when it comes to Plex (e.g. because you can create multiple libraries but they only allow pointing to a fixed folder per media type -> e.g. all movie libraries point to a hard-coded movies folder).
Keep in mind that NAS devices have limitations when it comes to transcoding your media. That has improved since more devices power CPUs that support hw accelerated streaming (to use this, you’ll need a Plex Pass).
Find below some helpful articles to support your choice:
Thanks for the reply, okay that’s good to hear. on my external drive I’ve got a Films and a TV series folder and that’s it really. Just looking down that NAS Compatibility list, is there anything that you reccomend for what i’m after? I like the WD drives as the price point is nice, don’t really want to be paying over £150 for a drive ideally. Yea I see what you mean about low processing power, last thing I want is it buffering every minute haha
That depends on how much storage you need.
Keep in mind you’re not buying a HDD but an actual mini server. In the end… a NAS is an actual low-power computer with attached storage that it’ll make available within your home network. So you’ll be paying for that plus the storage drives that’ll go into it.
I won’t be able to recommend one model or the other… all I got is the compatibility list posted above and the forum feedback where some users might start with a WD MyCloud but quite fast reach its limitations…
You can use your preferred price comparison page to look for a good deal, e.g.:
Thanks Tom, just had a look at the Nvidia Shield Pro TV which I really like the idea of. Can have it doubled up as a streaming device for my PC upstairs then and Stream Plex.
