Off the shelf NAS or build my own?

spudbynight

spudbynight

spudbynight

Soldato
Joined
8 Nov 2006
Posts
7,242
Location
Ireland/Northern Ireland Border
I'd like to get a NAS sorted out for myself. What I want to be able to do is backup from maybe 2-3 computers on my home network. I also want to be able to serve media with Plex including transcoding. As the machine is going to be on 24/7 I want to keep my power consumption down.

I've been looking at off the shelf NAS options from synology/qnap etc. I've also looked at the idea of building this myself. I want to keep costs down on this as well.

What should I be looking to do?

I did put together a NAS for myself a few years ago using an HP Microserver and xpenology. I have just moved house (and country) and been tied up with things for a while. This means I haven't been on top of developments with OS options. What should I be considering?
 
Armageus said:
Off the shelf refurbished HP (Elitedesk/Prodesk) or Dell (Optiplex) office PC with at least a 6th gen Intel Processor is probably the easiest way of meeting all of those requirements. They can be had for £100-£150, will take a couple of 3.5" hard drives, are designed for low power consumption and reliability.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that, but I've looked at the media support with the 6th gen and I don't think it will cut the mustard. I might look into what I can find with a more recent generation processor though.
 
Quartz said:
How significant is the Wife Acceptance Factor? If it's high, take a look at QNap's HS-264 and HS-453DX. The latter has the advantage of being expandable: you can put extra RAM and M.2 drives in it.
Click to expand...

Rarely, this isn't a factor at all. My wife is very keen to have our home server/NAS at home as she doesn't want to rely on cloud storage.

I've been looking at Dell Optiplex desktops with earlier gen processors on EBAY but can't really seem to find anything with more than one drive bay. :(

ChrisD. said:
Depends on a lot of factors but to say there isn’t any need is extremely misleading.
Click to expand...

Yes, certainly I make use of the abilty to transcode for remote playback quite a bit. It is nice to carry on watching something on the move and pick up where you left off at home.
 
HACO said:
No need to transcode for that. Multi-device network video resume features are pretty basic and most players have them.
Click to expand...

You need to be able to transcode for two reasons

1) You want to conserve bandwith
2) If your playback device can't play the media in question

I've got lots of stuff in 4K HDR which won't playback on everything I have and also is far too big a file to want to stream to something like an iPhone while on the train
 
dLockers said:
I use two of these. You can get disk drive bay converters for your 2.5" SSD/OS drive and then there is 1 bay for a 2.5" big drive.
Click to expand...

I really need 3.5" bays

HACO said:
Fair enough. This is a fair case for using transcoding. However you will find out that even after transcoding you won't be able to stream to your phone while on a train.
Click to expand...

Yeah, "on the train" is a bad example ;)

I do however spend quite a bit of time away from home in a fixed location where I can stream from my home server.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom