Best beginners Nas?

mushroomkid

I plan to mainly backup my movies and use Plex via Nvidia shield to watch on my PC.

Most of my important documents are saved on external drives and on the cloud like Dropbox, so not entirely worried about using it mainly for backup purposes. Any recommendations?

Will I need a ethernet switcher for my sky broadband "hub" router, which only has 2 ethernet ports? One is connected to pc and the other being used for power line

Puntoboy

Either Synology or QNAP. Both really straightforward and easy to use. Both will provide the functionality you require.

You'll need to decide how much capacity you need and what disk configuration you would like. Minimum will be 2 drives. Do you know how much data to need to backup and for your media files?

For the connection, you'll need an Ethernet switch. 5 ports is pretty much the minimum.

mushroomkid

Right now I'll need about 10tb for my media files.

Any specific models I need to look out for?

Puntoboy

I recommend using the Synology NAS selector. NAS Selector | Synology Inc.

I put in a few things and it came back with these as a minimum:

                                                                               

You'd need two 10TB drives for them and have them mirrored for redundancy.

You could go smaller drives, but have more of them and get a bigger NAS like these:

                                                                               

Budget will be key.

Sloppy Bob

I'd add it can get expensive doing this.

You need 10TB now, so you need double that for future expansion (20TB)
Do you want redundancy so you don't have to rip your discs again if there's a drive failure? (30TB)

Do you want a backup.... (60TB)

I'd always advocate buying a bigger NAS than you need now so you're not having to buy a 2nd NAS or sell it to buy a larger one.

One of the benefits I find of Synology is their Hybrid RAID (SHR) which allows you to mix drive sizes (within some simple rules), unlike traditional RAID in which all the drives have to be the same size or you waste larger drives extra space on them.

A cheap way to buy NAS HDD's is to get WD Red's when they have their Mybook Duo on sale on Amazon, you can just open the WD enclosure up and remove the drives, works out near half the price sometimes.

                                                https://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-24TB-Desktop-External-Drive/dp/B07W5V8GC9/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?keywords=mybook duo 24tb&qid=1575204585&sr=8-1-fkmr1                       
This was about £350 the other day IIRC and the drives are over £360 individually.

ElliotReid

I have a Synology DS418play that, amongst other things, I use as a Plex server and it can stream at least 2 4K streams at once, I’ve not tried any more than that. It’s a great NAS.

I wanted to have one device to store and play stuff through Plex and this makes it easy.

mushii

As cool is it sounds have you really thought about the amount of money and time you are going to throw at this? Compared to say buying an Apple TV and just buying movies?

Synology - DS418 Play -£430
2 x WD Red 10GB - 2 x £297

£1024

Apple TV 4K 64GB - £199
That leaves you £824 for movies.

at an average of £5 each (assuming bargains as well) that is 160 movies. With no PIA of ripping. Add on that the amount of time ripping 100  movies and for me ( a Plex Pass subscriber) a NAS doesn’t make as much sense (I also own a 214 Play).