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Data storage devices such as NAS and file servers don't "care" about what types of files you store on them. A file, is a file, is a file. NAS's don't have to do anything "special" for media files.
For a SOHO situation where security is not much, if any, concern, I suggest what mostly matters is whether the device you choose has enough storage capacity for your needs, does RAID or similar redundancy if you want it (it's by no means essential) and (probably) is easy to set up and use. Then maybe there's some aethestic concerns such as noise and heat and maybe consider "future proofing" in that adding additional storage later is easy to do.
A NAS ticks pretty much all those boxes - NAS's designed for the SOHO market are often designed to be "appliance" like and offer ease of use for non-technical people (with the quid pro quo, that they cannot do much more than they are designed either.)
A NAS is "just" a computer like any other, it's just that it's been stripped down to the bare minimum required to store files and serve them over a network. (Pretty much every computer since the epoch of Windows 3.1 has been able to do so.)
Where the waters get muddied is that there's been a lot of "function creep" in the NAS market as increasing amounts of facilities have been "added back in" that were originally omitted to make NAS's simple and cheap (e.g. media servers, backup agents, trancoders, data scrapers - the list is endless.)
I suggest the jumping off point is to determine what your playback device require for their back end storage devices (some, for example, might require Plex Media Server or DLNA support.) If you players do not require anything "special" above a file store serving out CIFS/SMB/NFS shares, then pretty much anything will do. |
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2-12-2019 04:37:28