Technically speaking, any desktop or laptop computer can work as a home media server with network attached storage and RAID capabilities. Fully Featured: Repurpose a Desktop or Laptop Keep in mind that you can combine these alternatives with a cheap NAS unit, allowing the PC, NVIDIA Shield, or Raspberry Pi to handle all the transcoding and processing while the NAS unit optimizes and manages the hard drives. These alternatives come with some drawbacks, but they offer more power than a NAS unit at a lower price, and in some cases, they’re easier to set up than a NAS device. If you’re intimidated by the almighty NAS device or don’t want to spend a fortune on a NAS unit that can transcode 4K video, you can still put together a good home-streaming setup with a PC, a Mac, a Raspberry Pi, or an NVIDIA Shield streaming stick. Everyone has different needs, but Synology’s handy RAID Calculator can help you visualize how different NAS and storage configurations will work with your home streaming server.Īlternatives Exist, and You Can Combine Them with a NAS Unit Intel, NVIDIA While a two-bay NAS unit will work for most people, you should seriously consider buying a NAS device with three or more drive bays to maximize usable storage space and ensure proper file redundancy with RAID (especially if you plan to store over 8TB of data). (You can also pair your NAS unit with another device.)
You can avoid a lot of transcoding by converting videos to the “universal” MP4 format and only streaming within your own home, but if you hope to beam 4K video to a ton of devices at once, you have to decide whether to buy an expensive NAS unit like the QNAP TVS-872N-i3-8G or go with a cheaper alternative. That said, NAS units that are powerful enough to transcode multiple high-res files are a bit expensive. Generally speaking, any popular NAS unit like the Synology DS220+ or the TerraMaster F2-221 will be able to stream 4K video or transcode multiple video streams simultaneously ( transcoding happens when your server needs to change a video’s file type or resolution, or add subtitles to the stream). Picking a NAS unit for home streaming is fairly easy thanks to the bustling Plex community. They’re power efficient, they don’t take up any more room than they should, and they help you breeze through things like Plex installation and the RAID setup process. The thing that’s important to understand right now is that, unlike the alternatives, dedicated NAS devices are actually intended for server applications. That’s not to say that dedicated NAS units are the only solution for network-attached storage and home streaming-there are several alternatives, and we’ll get to them in a minute. (File redundancy is always a tradeoff for usable storage space, and some people may opt for less redundancy to avoid spending a ton of money on hard drives.)Īll of these features make NAS devices an ideal candidate for Plex, especially if you’re inexperienced with drive arrays, servers, and home streaming. Adding new drives to your NAS device is incredibly easy, and depending on how you set up your raid array RAID, you might never need to worry about losing data if a drive needs to be replaced. They also use RAID to “combine” hard drives for increased performance and file redundancy, a form of real-time data backup. And much like the Dropbox and OneDrive cloud services, you can even access your NAS unit when you’re away from home.īecause NAS devices are intended for everyday consumers, they make the server setup process as straightforward as possible and feature multiple easy-to-access drive bays.
You can use your NAS unit to wirelessly back up files from your computer, phone, or tablet, or even download the files from your NAS without plugging a hard drive into your device.
In other words, they’re like cloud servers for your home.