NAS for home storage

lawred2

Hi,

Have a number of SATA disks of varying sizes lying about. Want to put together a low cost low power consumption NAS solution together.

Currently using an XPS tower for my NAS needs but it's massive overkill and utterly wasteful. It has an i7 processor, SSD for the OS, 12G RAM etc etc

Want to put together a real low cost alternative that will also function as a plex server. At most there will only ever be two clients - and to be honest that would be so rare as to be not worth planning for.

Should I be buying a cheap NAS enclosure or would I be better served sourcing some parts and putting together a home spun solution?

ED E

Will it ever need to transcode? Thats realy the key question between a Zyxel off the shelf and a self build.

witnessmenow

Personally I would pick up a HP microserver when they come up on offer.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056206048

lawred2

witnessmenow wrote: »

Personally I would pick up a HP microserver when they come up on offer.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056206048

very interesting..

where should I look for offers? AZ?

witnessmenow

Hotukdeals or just keep an eye on that thread on boards.

Usually happens every couple of months

dotsman

Bought the QNAP TS-251+ last summer and upgraded it to 8GB for an extra £30.

Perfect for NAS, Plex server with transcoding, low power consumption and it is very small. It can also be used for a variety of different things (web/db hosting, cctv etc). The plex server on it has handled everything I've thrown at it (a lot of HD quality), and even use it to stream over the internet to the tv in my parent's house whenever I visit without any issues.

Not sure why Amazon are now saying they won't deliver to Ireland (no problem when I bought it), but you should be able to get elsewhere. There are also 4 bay versions available.

If you want to run plex, you should really look at this list before choosing a NAS.

Ultimately, you are going to be choosing between power consumption, price and transcoding ability.

Lumen

lawred2 wrote: »

At most there will only ever be two clients - and to be honest that would be so rare as to be not worth planning for.

I wouldn't bother with a NAS in that case.

I've run them for years at home and they're generally slow and need regular maintenance with upgrades and patches.

I currently have a 4-bay Diskstation 412+ with something like 8TB and now just use it for archiving, but if I was starting again I'd probably just use USB 3 attached storage for that.

For streaming to TV it's easier to just shove it through a laptop using Chromecast (the Ultra version supports decent resolutions).

Obviously if you need IPTV or whatever then it might make sense, but for web server may as well just use cloud solutions.

ED E

Lumen wrote: »

I wouldn't bother with a NAS in that case.

I've run them for years at home and they're generally slow and need regular maintenance with upgrades and patches.

I currently have a 4-bay Diskstation 412+ with something like 8TB and now just use it for archiving, but if I was starting again I'd probably just use USB 3 attached storage for that.

For streaming to TV it's easier to just shove it through a laptop using Chromecast (the Ultra version supports decent resolutions).

Obviously if you need IPTV or whatever then it might make sense, but for web server may as well just use cloud solutions.

I think that really depends on a few factors, namely internet connection and whether fault tolerance matters. If you just store TBs of Game of Thrones at BR quality then a failure isnt a big issue but having to recover all your personal photos from an offsite provider is the kind of stress most want to avoid.


And plex is awesome, so worth doing just for that.

long_b

Another post for the HP Microserver. Happily running Plex for media and CrashPlan for family backups on 4GB RAM.