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NAS Quandary

Webzcas

Winter is Coming!
Staff member
Joined
Mar 31, 2005
Location
Block S25, South Stand, Ashton Gate, BS3
I currently have a Synologuy DS220j NAS which is populated with two 4TB Toshiba NAS HDD utilising RAID 0. It has a 1gb ethernet port and is plugged directly into one of the four 2.5gb ports my Asus AX4200 router has.

Whilst this NAS has no GPU and only 512MB of memory, for the purposes as a local cloud solution for backing up photos and videos taken on mobile devices, plus as a network file server, it works perfectly. Time Machine backups are also fine to run over the wifi network to it.

Yes, I do have my media content on there, but currently I have Plex Server setup on my MacBook which is connected via SMB to the media storage on the NAS. So basically all our smart devices such as firesticks can run Plex and play any media hosted on the NAS, via my MacBook which does all the transcoding of the video.

Now this is where my dilemma comes into play. I would like to expand the total capacity I have available, but that would mean I would have to replace and swap out the existing 4TB Toshiba drives, so I have been looking at redoing the whole setup and getting a new NAS.

Ideally one that can run Plex Server in its own right, So I am looking at the Synology 224+ - a two bay NAS, with 2GB memory which is upgradeable to 6GB and a dedicated intel CPU and importantly it is able to transcode video.

However once you add the drives into the equation ( I am thinking two 8TB drives, again using RAID 0 ), the price becomes quite considerable.

So I have thought about keeping my existing NAS ( which works perfectly fine btw ), replacing the two drives and getting off eBay an M1 Mac Mini to act as a headless Plex Server - which could sit in my small router cupboard. I can get this quite cheap - for less than £300.

Has anyone else got a NAS at home and if so, what did you go with and what do you use it for?

FYI ⬇️ my setup.


Screenshot 2025-06-27 at 16.55.24.webp
 
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