Reasonably Priced NAS for home use with occasional outside streaming

General Discussions
1

Hi all

I am looking into moving my media server that is currently running off a Dell laptop to a NAS drive, however I am struggling to find one that is reasonably priced.

I don’t want (and can’t afford) one that will do 1080p. Just want one that will play to max 2 devices at a time with the home network and sometimes outside the network.

Any recommendations please?

2

Sorry forgot to say looking to spend £199 max.

3

I don’t know much about the specifics but, IF you encode your stuff right then a crappy NAS might work because you will not need to transcode.
There is a link somewhere on these forums with a very detailed way to encode most media to support almost all devices.

4

The issue would be the “occasional outside streaming.” If you are referring to using Plex channel plugins, your success with channel plugins will be hit or miss, since online content comes in a wide variety of formats and may require transcoding.

5

NO cheap NAS will do what you want. (unless as suggested you down code everything so no transcoding needed))

I suggest buying a big USB drive or 2 or a cheap 2-4 bay NAS and leave your laptop to do the serving.

6

So, I want to understand the OP’s question 100%.

You want to spend no more than $300 USD to get the performance of a system that can cost upwards of $1200+ in an OTS NAS. (Without HDD’s)

Sorry, having run those lower ended machines, I can tell you it ain’t going to happen. If you want to get a system that can do what you want it to do, it’s going to cost some money. Or it’s going to cost you in the quality of the media you are streaming. Or in the media preparation to support all of the potential formats your local and remote streams could require. (Think of this as more disk space required for the media you store.)

You can’t get by with cheap and functional both. There is going to be a point of diminishing returns no matter what system you go with, if it’s not capable of handing what you ask it to do.

FYI, having run PMS on an Asustor AS-202T, an AS-304T and an AS-7004T, I have just a little bit of experience running PMS on a NAS. You are going to pay for it one way or the other. Performance or money right up front. (I got GREAT Direct Play from all three systems. It was the remote playback and transcoding to support it that had issues, until I went with a REAL CPU.)

Spend the money to get a real beefy CPU, or spend the money on storage to handle the different bitrates to handle your requirements. Either way it’s going to cost.