Basic NAS

timbo46

timbo46

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I'm looking for a basic NAS for streaming content to my tv and laptop. I've seen ones from Western Digital and Seagate so far, does anyone have any experience with them? Is there anything else I should consider? I will probably use Plex, and access for ipad would be a plus.
 
FreeNAS is good, I ran one in various forms for years. My last one was an ITX atom based, with a WD green 2TB hard drive and an 80+ PSU, so very power efficient. I found it to be pretty much bullet proof as a NAS, my only issue was that the version of FreeNAS I used was a beta and I never quite got the plugin's working properly for streaming to ipad etc. so I would make sure that the current release has the plugin system working and test it, or go with an older more tried and tested version. There are plenty of tutorials out there as its quite a popular OS, and it will run on just about any old hardware you have knocking around. Plus, it's FREE!
 
Just buy a Qnap. Easy to setup and manage and worth every penny.
 
Thanks for the quick replies, I like the sound of free! but I don't think i'm tech savvy enough. The Qnap looks good but is outside my budget, I'm looking for something about 4TB and don't want to spend more than a £200 if possible. I would consider smaller capacity if I could plug an extra drive in, either external or internal.

edit; this is the one I was thinking of buying,http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00BP5RKIE/ref=noref?ie=UTF8&psc=1&s=computers
 
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Another consideration is what you are going to host from it, and how. For example, I had to upgrade my wireless setup to N+ in order to be able to stream HD movies, as a wired network wasn't an option ( according to SWMBO).

Have a quick shufti at this, explains FreeNAS. http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/01/how-to-set-up-a-home-file-server-using-freenas/

My current setup is a custom built Windows Home Server 2011 server, with 6 hot swappable drives giving me 6TB net storage, but I have them pooled with drive bender and redundancy on my main folders so that means should a drive fail, all my data is still there and i just need to swap out the broken drive.
 
timbo46 said:
Thanks for the quick replies, I like the sound of free! but I don't think i'm tech savvy enough. The Qnap looks good but is outside my budget, I'm looking for something about 4TB and don't want to spend more than a £200 if possible. I would consider smaller capacity if I could plug an extra drive in, either external or internal.

edit; this is the one I was thinking of buying,http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00BP5RKIE/ref=noref?ie=UTF8&psc=1&s=computers
Click to expand...

If you want to actually store 4TB of data that you care about then that is not the right choice as it offers zero data redundancy.
 
inkiboo said:
If you want to actually store 4TB of data that you care about then that is not the right choice as it offers zero data redundancy.
Click to expand...

True, the OP should look for a solution where they can setup raid 5, the downside is that to get 4TB, he'd need three 2TB drives. 6TB total, but only 4TB useable, but with redundancy.
 
Thanks everyone, I think i'll have to look at these options before I buy anything.
 
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