NAS or Mac Mini for novice plex build on a budget?

General Discussions
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I am looking to build a plex PMS and am debating NAS or mac mini + externals. I currently have 2 400 disc blu ray changers (Sony BDP-CX960) that are mostly full with a mix of BD and DVDs (figure 350 blu ray and 350 DVD) so I am looking to have about 32TB in storage. I don’t care about bonus materials or extras, I just want to rip the feature films with good audio in english.

I will mostly stream to an apple TV4K and a roku in my house though once I am up and running I may figure out a way to give family access if I can do so easily. I want enough power to run transcoding on multiple streams so I have looked at buying a mac mini (like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/263497311980?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&fromMakeTrack=true). I would like to have RAID5 but I have high storage needs and the budget isn’t unlimited (Ideally I’d stick around $1200) so there would be a benefit to going with mac mini+ externals because I could build it over time with less up front cost but I am leaning towards NAS for aesthetics and ease of setup. I am also struggling with getting a 4bay NAS since even with 6TB drives I would be maxed out pretty fast with just my blu rays.

I guess my questions are as follows

  1. NAS or mac mini+external HDD recommendation
  2. If I get a 4 bay NAS can I start with 2 8TB drives running without RAID and leave the other bays empty for a while (this would keep me at around $1200 and let me start ripping all these discs)
  3. I am leaning towards the WD 4100 NAS because I understand plex can use its transcoding engine, is this a good option for me (ultimately with the plan to have 4 8TB drives for 32TB total storage and some lesser amount usable running RAID5)
  4. I’m not tech savvy enough to go the bit torrent route but I have seen some PC equivalents to the mac mini that have DVD drives built in, is there a windows option (like this: https://www.amazon.com/Intel-NUC5CPYH-Graphics-2-5-Inch-BOXNUC5CPYH/dp/B00XPVRR5M/ref=as_at?imprToken=RGSCaSqeUTTDsCY8lzoxbw&slotNum=12&SubscriptionId=AKIAIO22DD3AFUSKXUKQ&tag=makeusw-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00XPVRR5M) I should consider?

thanks in advance for your time and consideration as well as your input

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well crap I added a username so I don’t know why my email is showing

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Oh I’ll ask another question. I haven’t ripped anything yet so what format is the most flexible and if I am mostly going to watch on an apple TV or roku in my home do I need to worry about transcoding on the fly?

4

Why sink money into hardware? $1200 will pay for ten years of G Suite for Business with unlimited storage on Google Drive & you won’t have to worry about hardware failures & replacement or backups or other management. Provided you have a decent network connection moving all your media to the Cloud is for more flexible & much cheaper.

You can either run PMS on a VPS in the Cloud or mount the Google Drive on a local system.

5

G Suite is a good suggestion that I had not considered, but I still prefer to own and control my media. It is the same reason I still own physical blu rays

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