NAS Box - Home use

_Jimlad_

_Jimlad_

_Jimlad_

Soldato
Joined
5 Jun 2005
Posts
20,913
Location
Southampton
Hello all,

currently i have a usb stick hanging out my router, which is slow and small.

Looking to add 1TB drive for movie play back on a sting devices running Android and Windows,

can anyone recommend a Nas Box, with or without drives and also any useful tips advise

Jimlad
 
I have a WD My Cloud NAS which is 3TB. The drives aren't transferable (without voiding the warranty anyway) but I think it's a superb bit of kit, especially as I can stream all my data from outside the house etc.
 
Andybtsn said:
I have a WD My Cloud NAS which is 3TB. The drives aren't transferable (without voiding the warranty anyway) but I think it's a superb bit of kit, especially as I can stream all my data from outside the house etc.
Click to expand...

thanks i will take a look

LordBarrass said:
Have a look at our home and small office section of NAS units. you can add one drive to a 2 bay unit and then add another drive as needed.
Click to expand...

Yes i did have a browse but was hoping for some more recommendations
 
I've been using a 214SE Synology NAS as a media server at home, and I'm pretty happy with it. Lots of free software, and a great OS that's easy to use. Very low power and noise. It's not desperately fast, and no NAS has the speed to do media transcoding well enough, but it works well.

What I did was figure out what software I wanted to use, and then checked what NAS would support it, and then I had a shortlist where I could look at power and noise reviews.
 
_Jimlad_ said:
OK cool I two have Sony tv and br
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The Serviio guys did a lot of work with Sony to get it running well, and Sony tagged them as the preferred DNLA server. I tried Plex, which has some slightly nicer presentation and organisation and was a little simpler to set up, but I found Serviio just did a better job of getting correct playback. Serviio just seemed to handle more formats and got the aspect ratio right where Plex would get it wrong or refuse to play stuff.

There were also issues with Plex not supporting the newer Synology models, with "no current plans" to do so as of about six months ago.

Just make sure you choose the correct profiles for your TV/BR player, and everything just seems to work. MKVs seem to be especially well supported.
 
My personal preference is the Synology range. Had a 2 bay one for a while, but wanted more grunt so now running one of the HP Microservers and the XPenology software with 4 drives in a pool.

Looking at the guide I thought it would be quite complicated but it's as easy as adding the software to a USB stick, popping it into the internal USB port (out of sight), adding my drives and bingo, a 4/5 bay Synology NAS for peanuts.

Currently runs Plex, my VPN so I can connect to my network out and about/abroad, sabnzbd, sickbeard and couchpotato.
 
I've been dealing with the same dilemma recently. I agree the Synology range looks to be one of the better solutions and have opted to go for he DS214play as it has a SD card reader, eSata port for local and fast connection to my PC and HW transcoding when streaming non-supported formats. I agree MKV is a great format for most modern smart TV's (I have a 6yr old and a 1yr old Samsung LED smartTV), but if you want to be able to easily stream to Apple devices as well, you should convert to MP4/M4A formats with an AAC primary audio track and AC3 5.1 secondary for passthrough to an AV amp for 5.1 surround sound decode. You can be happy then that your HW transcoded will hardly ever need to be used but it will have the grunt to manage 2-3 independent streams concurrently. If you want a bigger unit, look at the 414play but it lacks the SD and eSATA ports
 
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