Hi people, I have been looking for a NAS for quite a while now for my home network and I’m now facing a dilema.
I have a few checkboxes to tick to say “that’s the right one”:
- [ ] can be mounted on rack
- [ ] can be used as Plex server
- [ ] supports 10gbit connection
I am also concerned about noise level as I’ll be running this in my living room (no better spot yet) and energy consumption.
Option A: Buying an Actual NAS
I looked a bit into NAS with ARM CPUs as they are more energy-efficient, but they don’t seem to bee suitable for video transcoding. Then I seem to be left with only some Synology options:
Option B: Buying a Rackmount Server
I then found a bunch of very interesting refurbished servers. Not going to show everything I found as it would be pointless, but here’s an example:
DELL R630 8SFF
- CPU: 2x Intel Xeon E5-2650 v4 (12C 30M Cache 2.20 GHz)
- RAM: 32Gb 2x16GB DDR4 RDIMM 2133MHz
- RAID Controller: Dell RAID H730
- Power Supply: 1xPS 750w
- Price: 865 EUR
I could even go with lower specs for the purpose of a NAS.
Question
Can you folks please help me look for the right things? Do you have any suggestions? Any other places I could be looking at?
Do not put a rack mount server in a living room, especially a 1U. The boise will never be manageable for that kind of room.
Also, the server will idle around 100 watts. The NAS much less.
I suppose that’s what I needed to hear. Thank you very much! Do you happen to know some NAS that does well at transcoding and is within this €1500 range?
No, I don’t keep track of consumer NAS as I DIY everything. I can recommend that but I recognize it’s not for everyone. I see that it’s popular to use an Intel NUC or similar as the server hosting Plex and other apps, and leave the NAS simply for storage; that’s very enticing.