NAS box longevity/flexibility for streaming

NotAGolf

NotAGolf

NotAGolf

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My portable hard drive has filled up so I'm facing a dilemma. I can either spend ~£80 for a 2TB portable hard drive OR ~£200 for a NAS box and a 2TB hard drive.

I've always wanted a NAS box as they're far more flexible, but tbh there's other things I'd rather spend my money on than storage!

I'm currently looking at the Synology DS214se 2 Bay. I don't think I'll ever push the max capacity limit as I've been hovering around ~1TB for a while now. My main concern is that as it's a budget model I may find myself wishing for a more powerful/feature-filled unit in a few years.

I can only see myself using it for simple streaming tasks, so I can't see things changing massively, but I was curious if anyone else has been in a similar boat and found themselves forced to upgrade later on and if so what your reasons were.
 
I've got the DS214se, works really well. Only using it with one 3TB WD Red HDD at the moment, I'll add another later. Mostly it's being used for storing/streaming media and to store backups from my PC, but I do want to find other uses for it as it's a very flexible bit of kit and the DSM software is very powerful when used properly.

About the only thing it can't do is transcode video to other formats, you'd need the DS214play for that as it's got better hardware. Wasn't important to me and certainly didn't seem worth paying double for.
 
I got an Asustor AS-302t recently. Really good device, very fast for the price and much cheaper than competitors of similar spec. The Intel Atom processor helps a lot with 'apps' like transmission and SABnzbd.

Got it paired with a 2tb WD Red and it's great. The AS-202te can be had for £200 and it's similar, just a slightly weaker cpu clock speed.
 
Use WHS2011 on n40L

id say my microserver + whs is one of best things i have bought

it has 4 HDD spaces with potential for more in the top. i have 3*3 and 1*2TB drives
laptop backs up everynight
htpc backsup everynight
etc etc
have a drive on there that mirrors my mobile phone SD at 10pm each night over the wireless

only comes on when another machine is connected to it

i decided to swap my laptop HDD for an SSD and simply loaded the previous days backup onto it, literally took 30 mins

tbh if you dont need that capacity however microserver is overkill
 
They are nice looking things, but the price of network capable HDDs from the mainstream manufacturers is coming down and I don't think I need the capabilities of the micro server really.
 
If you get the cashback then they are under £100. Mine can do 110+ Mb/s transfer all day long over the network. Whilst also managing mysql database for xbmc, a minecraft server, Plex server etc etc


You could also use as a HTPC..

Oh and a microserver + 2tb hard drive is a little over £150
 
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I got a 4 bay Netgear readynas 104 filled with 3TB reds, it has DLNA, cloud software and it's own App Store etc.

Very easy to configure.

Although the easiest NAS I've ever used and still do is the Drobo.
 
Microserver. Simply the best value purchase I've ever made.

If you're non-technical and want Apple-level ease of use, get a Synology or Drobo.
 
tom_nieto said:
They are nice looking things, but the price of network capable HDDs from the mainstream manufacturers is coming down and I don't think I need the capabilities of the micro server really.
Click to expand...



I thought this and got a synology from MM. It got filled up fast and that's why I got a N54L.
Also you can use all the sinology mobile apps with gnoBoot XPEnology ;)
 
hard not to recommend a microserver really. That with xpenology installed covers just about every base and really for the price they are in another league compared to anything else out there.
 
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