ASUS-AX6000 slow NAS speed

[L&LD]

Built-in battery? For a NAS? No. Fire hazard at best. Unless you're camping with your movies, this makes little sense to me.

A simple/inexpensive unit like your post 11 (but, from a known manufacturer), may be your best bet for 'data' that you regularly delete.

 

[bennor]

Would I perhaps be better with something such as the WD My Cloud Home?

No, no, no. DO NOT get a My Cloud Home. The My Cloud Home is a disaster, go read about it in the WD support forums. Its not a real NAS. It requires internet access to setup/work. It has limited features and options. And if I remember right the OS is Android. There are MUCH better options for a bit more money than the My Cloud Home. If you are going to look at what is left of the My Cloud line of products, look to the My Cloud EX2 Ultra if you have to, and even then there are likely better options from other manufacturers like Synology and QNAP.
If you need the NAS to run Plex or be a media server and or do transcoding its best to spend a little more and get a capable NAS. If you plan on running Plex see their NAS compatibility page.
You can buy a two bay NAS but only populate one bay if needed.

And did I say don't buy a My Cloud Home?

PS: One could always go the DIY build your own NAS route. It can be a cheap way to get an entry level NAS if one has the old hardware laying around. There are several free NAS OS's out there to choose from. Or go with a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, or similar SoC device, and build a basic NAS that way. Lots of DIY guides out there for building an NAS.

 

[Liam96]

Built-in battery? For a NAS? No. Fire hazard at best. Unless you're camping with your movies, this makes little sense to me.

A simple/inexpensive unit like your post 11 (but, from a known manufacturer), may be your best bet for 'data' that you regularly delete.

Noted, I didn't consider that part although it would be powered in all times I have no idea what difference that would make honestly as I have no plans to use it wirelessly

No, no, no. DO NOT get a My Cloud Home. The My Cloud Home is a disaster, go read about it in the WD support forums. Its not a real NAS. It requires internet access to setup/work. It has limited features and options. And if I remember right the OS is Android. There are MUCH better options for a bit more money than the My Cloud Home. If you are going to look at what is left of the My Cloud line of products, look to the My Cloud EX2 Ultra if you have to, and even then there are likely better options from other manufacturers like Synology and QNAP.
If you need the NAS to run Plex or be a media server and or do transcoding its best to spend a little more and get a capable NAS. If you plan on running Plex see their NAS compatibility page.
You can buy a two bay NAS but only populate one bay if needed.

And did I say don't buy a My Cloud Home?

PS: One could always go the DIY build your own NAS route. It can be a cheap way to get an entry level NAS if one has the old hardware laying around. There are several free NAS OS's out there to choose from. Or go with a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, or similar SoC device, and build a basic NAS that way. Lots of DIY guides out there for building an NAS.

Yeah I wasn't 100% sold on that idea neither lol, I'm just struggling to find something cheap that's like a small boxed unit that won't take up too much space that I can just use to store movies on and access them when I need to.

At this point I think I might just have to suck it up with the speed I'm getting from the SSD connected to the router as I can't find another setup that would be similar but that would yield faster transfer speeds. There's so many different options for network attached storage that I'm getting a bit overwhelmed and don't fancy building my own tbh. Just looking for a quick 'get the job done' solution but it's seemingly impossible

 

[Tech9]

CPU is weak and showed it being unable to buffer a 480p video

You asked for a cheap NAS. If you are asking for NAS plus Media Server encoding - this is different. You have to pay more for better CPU and more RAM. The little Sinology can do 100MB/sec large single file transfers like video files. I had one similar before with 2-bay and it worked as a NAS better than any home router with USB attached drive. You have to set some more realistic expectations from the devices you are looking at. There is always something better, but it costs more.

 

[coxhaus]

For non-critical and replaceable data you can get 1-bay NAS like Sinology DS120j for about $150 plus the cost of the HDD inside. It's small and power efficient.

You need to be careful as I had one that gave me false positive on WD hard drive failure. I switched over to an older Dell PC to store my files on. My thinking is a Dell PC has a better power supply over one of those small NASs. When you get into the bigger NASs you end up with a better power supply.

 

[Tech9]

Lots of DIY guides out there for building an NAS.

Indeed and it doesn't have to be something very complicated for home use. What I use was described here:

Cheap NAS to replace USB functionality + SMB that my router sucks at?

https://www.snbforums.com/threads/rt-ax92u-usb-smb-seems-fragile-crashes-router.73108/ I have a nice USB SSD and I simply want to access it for light usage across the house. Main use is watching movies, but obviously once in a while I need to copy things across, which is when the rt-ax92u...

www.snbforums.com

It's still running 24/7 with very consistent performance. The mini-PC is perhaps overkill, but I got it for like $100 off eBay.

 

[Liam96]

You asked for a cheap NAS. If you are asking for NAS plus Media Server encoding - this is different. You have to pay more for better CPU and more RAM. The little Sinology can do 100MB/sec large single file transfers like video files. I had one similar before with 2-bay and it worked as a NAS better than any home router with USB attached drive. You have to set some more realistic expectations from the devices you are looking at. There is always something better, but it costs more.

That I did and I appreciate your help. I've had a look at the one you mentioned and if you check this review from about 3 minutes on it seems to be unable to playback a low quality video making this an unsuitable option for its use case.

Would this be correct that it wouldn't be able to do video playback? If so, what are my other options? Thanks again.

 

[bennor]

... it seems to be unable to playback a low quality video making this an unsuitable option for its use case.

In the video at the 3 minute mark the guy is talking about the Plex Media Server. Are you currently using Plex? If not, do you want or need to use the Plex Media Server? Not sure what the issue is that he experienced on that NAS but Plex Media Server runs on a wide variety of devices. Ran it for several years on a lowly Raspberry Pi 3B+ mostly without issue. Without knowing more about that guy's setup its hard to say exactly what the buffering issue was or if it was a NAS problem, media file problem, or a problem somewhere else (like streaming over WiFi or remotely). As mentioned up thread if you want to use Plex Media Server, see the provided Plex NAS Compatibility list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...Ac4oOLPRtCkgUxU0jdj3tmMPc/edit#gid=1274624273

See line 323 in that Plex NAS compatibility list for the Synology DS120J. Per a note for the DS120J:
"HD 1080p media will work, but higher bitrates may produce buffering during playback or result in playback failure."

Using Plex is different that just clicking on a file and playing it direct from the NAS using Windows File Explorer or Mac Finder (non DLNA access) via a media player (VLC, etc.) on the computer or mobile device.

 

[BrimoXD99]

My understanding is that your goal is to have a device on which you would like to store movie files and watch them on TV, right?
How do you plan to send videos from device (NAS) to your TV? Is your TV also connected to your LAN?
If so then you should consider to buy some cheap HTC (Home Theater Center) device like for instance Odroid N2(+) install on it CoreELEC with Kodi player, add in Kodi a source of your movies folder (NFS location on NAS) hook this Odroid N2(+) to your TV (or AVR) using HDMI cable and then you are able to watch any type of video content without a worry that you will lack of sound (DTS or HD Master Audio which typically TV set is not able to decode) and any type of video (SDR, HDR10, HDR10+, Xvid, x264, x265 codecs)
NAS (Synology or QNAP recommended) + HTC (Odroid N2(+) with CoreELEC) + Smart TV + AVR (Denon, Yamaha, Marantz, etc.) all connected to your LAN and you are able to copy a movie from your PC to NAS (using WinSCP application with speed around 100 Mbit/s) and start watching movie within seconds when copy is completed.
Alternativelly - you could open NAS shared folder using in-built Media Center application (I think all TVs are able to browse NFS shares shared on NAS) but as mentioned - you could face a lack of sound for high resolution sound streams like DTS or HDMA, which is obvious - TVs are not suppose to decode video and audio streams - they should be used for only receiving streams, decoding should be done by HTC.
Second Alternative: find NAS with HDMI output and connect it to your TV. As far as I recall QNAP has such models.

 

[Tech9]

it seems to be unable to playback

A NAS doesn't playback anything. It's a Network Attached Storage. The guys above run other software on it. This is not the best model for this purpose.

 

[Liam96]

Hey guys, just to update this. I've instead discovered that I can enable FTP share on the routers USB application settings. Now, I just access the drive via FileZilla and transfer the files that way. I'm now reaching transfer speeds of around 44 MB/s which is a big improvement over the 10 MB/s via the Samba share. I'm assuming this is just a limitation with transferring using Samba. I'm now satisfied with the transfer speeds I'm getting via FTP and if anyone comes looking at this thread that's in a similar situation, I just recommend enabling the FTP share.