Hepl in selecting a new home NAS please

[Jim Lenahan]

Hi,
I have tried to do my homework before posting, and also have some decent past (old) computer experience, but I have to say I only get more confused as I dig deeper.

I have a good megabit router, a Shield media box, and two home PCs. I have about 500 mb of movies on an old disk drive. I am considering buying a 4 bay NAS for the movies, PC back up (under 500 mb) and room for growth. I would only use three bays in some RAID set up.

My confuson is in the processing needs. If I need transcoding I think the shield box, running plex, takes care of that. So "I Think" I do not need a powerful unit, just a basic 4 bay NAS. If in the future my network intelligence (transcoding or other) needs come along, I think I would add a separate box (NIC,etc). Am I missing something or do I have this right?

Thanks

 

[thiggins]

First, rethink your four-bay requirement. Drive capacities are now up to 8 TB. So a 2-bay NAS running RAID1 is all most people need.

If you think you are going to want transcoding, then buy a NAS that supports it. Pay attention to specs and research your choice before buying; some NASes that tout transcoding only offer it in batch mode, not on-the-fly/realtime.

 

[Jim Lenahan]

Thank you Tim,

I followed up on your suggestions and I am leaning towards The Synology DS218. Are there other, similar units I should consider?

Thanks again,
Jim

 

[Marin]

I am a new at this too. I have a lot of DVD's that I want to eventually save in a similar device which is connected to my RT-AC86U. I would like to stream these movies in my network. Any idea at where should I start looking? How much space is appropriate? I seeall of these multiway devices but dont know a whole lot about them. I have a lot of movies and frankly, all of these DVD's takes so much space and it would be nice to save them somewhere in a library where they can organized and streamed as needed.

Thank you so much!