What is a simple & cheap NAS setup for remote music access?

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
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Hello,
I’m pretty new to Plex and trying to figure out what kind of hardware to invest in for setting up a simple server for streaming my music collection. I’ve been spending some time researching online, but it seems like most examples talk about video streaming which I’m not really concerned about, so I’m finding it hard to untangle how much performance I really need.

Goal:

  • Host music library for remote access (I’m not concerned with video)
  • Low Cost
  • Easy Set Up (I’m not too savvy with this stuff)
  • Backup / archive old photos and such

I’ve been looking at these devices:

  • Synoloty DS220j
  • Asustor AS3203T

Questions:

  • If I’m only concerned about music, do I need to worry about whether a NAS supports transcoding?
  • If I’m only concerned about steaming music, how much RAM would I need?
  • Is there anything else I should be asking?
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  1. just about any x86 based nas should be plenty powerful for any music streaming or transcoding. I would suggest avoiding any arm based systems, even if they may be more energy efficient or similar power or cheaper.

  2. 4 gig would likely be the minimum, 8 would be a good recommended, 16+ would just allow the nas more free to cache disk access. Ram usage will vary with the size of the library, and any other apps/processes running on the nas besides plex.

  3. audio transcoding generally only uses 1 core, so if you have the choice between more cores, or more mhz, go with more mhz.
    normal plex direct audio playback/streaming uses minimal cpu, transcoding can use a little, but the initial scan/import of libraries can use quite a bit of cpu processing. Using low power cpu will simply take longer to do scanning/matching/volume analysis/etc, than more powerful cpus. Depending the processor and size of library, this could mean it could take days or weeks to finish any processing (which plex would normally do during the maintenance window in your server settings).

1 Like
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Awesome, thanks @TeknoJunky,

Its actually kind of hard to find something low cost with x86 rather than arm apparently, but the specs for the AS3202T are:

  • Intel Celeron 1.6GHz (x86)
  • Quad Core (so way more than the 1 needed, but oh well, haha)
  • 2gb memory
  • a bit over $200 on Amazon
  • Planning to pair it with a Seagate IronWolf 6TB NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD

…and a laundry list of specs that I mostly don’t understand how to distinguish what is important from what is fluff, haha

I think I’ll go with this one unless there are any red flags in there.

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Another question -
For now, I’m thinking to just buy one hard drive to save a bit of money (all of my stuff is already backed up on a little external hard drive).

If I get one HD now and load it up, and then in a few months buy and install an additional HD in the other slot, is it usually pretty easy to set them up to have automatic redundancy later?

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unless you increase ram, you may find this is not enough, especially if you intend to run any other ‘apps’ on the nas at the same time.

yes most nas allow for adding disks/expansion, you will want to refer to the particular nas owners manual and/or forums for details though.

you may also want to review any existing posts about this model (or any other model) by searching the forum

https://forums.plex.tv/search?q=AS3202T

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