I’m finally ready to take the plunge and buy an NAS. But I want to make sure I have the right plan going in so I don’t make any stupid mistakes.
I currently have a TV with APPLE TV in my living room, a TV with Roku in my bedroom, a MacBook Pro, and a PC in the home office.
I would like to keep the NAS in my basement and connect it to my cable modem via an ethernet cable. I would then stream everything via WiFi to the PC, MacBook, AppleTV and Roku. (Quick explanation : my cable modem is mounted behind a cabinet in my living room. Putting the NAS downstairs allows me to put it right underneath the modem, running the cable through the floor. Otherwise, I would have to find some MacGyver type solution to connecting the NAS to the modem with long cable through the walls.)
Does this connection setup sound effective? Can I manage the contents of the NAS with the PC via Wi-Fi or do I need a wired connection between the NAS and the PC? How that all works is a little fuzzy to me.
Also, if anyone can recommend an NAS in the range of $500 it would be appreciated.
Synology NAS products are arguably the most popular here because of their UI.
QNAP products have more CPU power (which you pay more for)
The first, and perhaps most important, decision you will need make is ‘How many drive slots?’ . This depends entirely on how fast you are growing your library. With the cost of disks relatively constant, they are reusable. When you outgrow the chassis, now you have a problem. How do you reuse it? Synology allows expansion bays but these cost almost as much as a new NAS. DIY solutions are nice in this regard. You create an open-ended architecture you can add to for a very long time with the only down-side being it may or may not be the highly polished solution you want.
To share what I have.
I have the DS1815+ w/ 8x 6TB WD Red Pro drives. Economics of this is: $900 for the NAS and $2200 for the drives
The network backbone switch is the HP 1820-8G (soon to be the 16 port version). It is properly running LACP (3 Gb/sec) from the Synology yielding 275+ MB/sec.
Size the NAS to serve your needs in both performance and storage. If you’re willing to prepare your media for DirectPlay in all cases, you can save a little on the CPU. Given NAS product advancements, look at your expected growth rate versus product growth rate of a perspective vendor then gauge accordingly.
@ChuckPA Still getting the idea of how these systems are set up … I assume all your media is house on the NAS while the server is stored on your PC? Or does the NAS you have have enough processing power to handle the transcoding?
If you have a good Internet connection before spending hundreds on hardware you really should look at Plex Cloud . It has a limit of three simultaneous transcodes which should suit most domestic arrangements although probably not those who share their libraries with friends & relatives. The only cost is Plex Pass plus $10/month for G Suite Business for the unlimited storage Google Drive.
Plex Cloud does an outstanding job of transcoding 4K. I uploaded a 65GB 60Mbps 4K UHD Blu-ray rip & this happily plays on all my devices (Roku 3, Roku Ultra, iPhone 6s Plus, Amazon Fire TV 4K, web app on my Retina MacBook Pro etc). It even plays nicely on the iPhone on 3G/4G cellular when away from WiFi.
Plex Cloud is a game changer. Anyone thinking of buying hardware for their own Plex Server should think again. provided you have a decent Internet connection Plex Cloud can provide a better Plex experience than local hardware & the cost saving is enormous.
