OK, tell me why I should get a NAS rather than just a USB3 external drive?

NeilF · 5 Oct 2017 at 12:19

I currently have a small Dell Optiplex i5 PC which in effect acts as my server. It runs Plex and Logitech media server.

My music & photos are on the Optiplex as they don't use up silly amounts of space, but my Plex movies/TV series are on a crummy old XTreamer 3tb NAS. That NAS is slow and almost full (it's not gigabit ethernet), so time to move on...

Plan 1 - NAS
Get something like a QNAP TS-251+ with a 6TB red drive and another 6TB Red Drive which I backup (robocopy) to in a caddie. This doubles my current NAS storage.

Cost: £700ish
Pros: Expandable. Can put another drive in the Qnap, and then buy a JBOD USB3 external enclosure to continue the simple robocopy process to.

Plan 2 - Local External USB3 Drive
Buy a Seagate External 8TB USB Hub and put all my movies on that instead, local to the Dell Optiplex. Buy a 6TB Red Drive and backup the Seagate to that via a USB caddie. This doubles my current NAS storage.

Cost: £350ish
Pros: Even faster access to media (over USB3 instead of gigabit!).
Cons: Not expandable.

So Plan 1 is clearly a lot more expensive than Plan 2. My current library of films and TV series isn't growing at a huge rate so I suspect another 3GB will see me through many many years!

Ultimately, it comes down to are there other bells and whistles the NAS might offer that I'm simply not thinking of? Are there any features people use on their NAS that they think are really useful?

I'm also slight wary of spending a lot of money heading into 4k territory. ie: I'd imagine in 2-3yrs time we'll be playing 4K media through Plex regularly?

hornetstinger · 5 Oct 2017 at 12:22

Because with a NAS any device on your LAN can access the data. With a USB hard drive, the host computer has to be on.

The NAS has it's own firmware, typically Linux, and uses EXT system, compared to USB 3 which if connected to Windows machine will be NTFS, also a Linux system will be more secure, so if your computer is infected so will the USB HD.

I use a couple of NAS's, for music storage (and NAS has slimserver installed) video storage it's fine. If it was streaming/encoding on the fly then I can see not enough CPU power. But I don't do that so not a problem

NeilF · 5 Oct 2017 at 12:30

hornetstinger said:
Because with a NAS any device on your LAN can access the data. With a USB hard drive, the host computer has to be on.

The NAS has it's own firmware, typically Linux, and uses EXT system, compared to USB 3 which if connected to Windows machine will be NTFS, also a Linux system will be more secure, so if your computer is infected so will the USB HD.

I use a couple of NAS's, for music storage (and NAS has slimserver installed) video storage it's fine. If it was streaming/encoding on the fly then I can see not enough CPU power. But I don't do that so not a problem

Understood, but to use Plex or the Logitech server, I'm happy to have the Dell PC on, so that takes that out of the issues?:-
Plan 1 - The NAS would always be on so would boot up when the PC accessed it.
Plan 2 - The USB enclosure would boot up when the PC turned on.

It would be lovely to put Plex on a NAS, but from what I've read, transcoding 1080p material can push them to the limit, where as my Dell PC wouldn't have a problem. I suspect it could even transcode 4k -> 720p if required possibly!?

I'm looking for if there's other things offered from a NAS that might sway the choice? eg: Remote file access, or music library access etc etc...

hornetstinger · 5 Oct 2017 at 12:34

eg: Remote file access, or music library access etc etc...

yup there's that as well, built in UPNP, FTP, telnet, remote setup from another machine, install "apps" etc etc.

A NAS is a simple stand alone server, sure you could do the same (and more) with a computer and RAID array but NAS is nice and simple

NeilF · 5 Oct 2017 at 12:38

hornetstinger said:
yup there's that as well, built in UPNP, FTP, telnet, remote setup from another machine, install "apps" etc etc.

A NAS is a simple stand alone server, sure you could do the same (and more) with a computer and RAID array but NAS is nice and simple

How painful is it to setup your router to allow access to your NAS then if you say want to get access to files on it remotely. Or allow guest access etc?

swain90 · 5 Oct 2017 at 13:49

While I agree with the point of a nas generally being more secure from a virus point of view. For everything else it's pretty much identical to using your PC with a external drive attached.

I personally have a HP Gen8 microserver which for all intents and purposes is basically a nas, however IMO has more options to configuration than a nas as it's running Windows Server 2012R2.

The other thing to consider is that a nas may use less electricity than your desktop PC, however it'd take a long time to make up that ~£300 difference in the 2 options you've listed.