NAS drive for home media sharing - recommendations?

J

jamiez

Senior member
 SW London
All - i know we have some good techies on here, so thought I would ask!

Looking to buy a NAS drive to setup in my new house. Purpose will be for it to act as a central media store for everything and then it to be where we pull content down from to any of our devices i.e TV, ipad/phone, PS4 etc etc

Will a straight forward wired/wiress NAS drive do the job?
Anything to be cautious of?

Im looking for around 1 or 2 TB of storage - so any suggested links to good product to buy would be a bonus also

Thanks!!
Jamie
 
A (good) few years ago I started looking down the NAS route for centralising storage, got one, set it up and didn't really get on with it. Network transfers were particularly slow. I built a server and put Home Server 2011 on it, not as cheap but much more flexible. If that cost and complexity is beyond you then I'm sure NAS has improved since I tried but have a good look at your network infrastructure.
If you can wire anything then do so, WiFi is convenient but slow for transfers, switches are cheap.
 
Scooba_Steve said:
A (good) few years ago I started looking down the NAS route for centralising storage, got one, set it up and didn't really get on with it. Network transfers were particularly slow. I built a server and put Home Server 2011 on it, not as cheap but much more flexible. If that cost and complexity is beyond you then I'm sure NAS has improved since I tried but have a good look at your network infrastructure.
If you can wire anything then do so, WiFi is convenient but slow for transfers, switches are cheap.
Click to expand...


Great feedback - yes, speed is important as there will be a degree of media content streaming. For sure, the wired option would be a good move. Even these days with consoles - the best (least!) lag is by having a direct connection for when you are playing online
 
tis a minefield out there!

I have a Synology DS212j with 2 1TB disks in it which are raided (mirrored) to provide some redundancy should one fail. On to that you can install various applications in addition to the synology apps. This works well providing music to our SONOS music systems. Recently started ripping our DVDs and Blurays to it also - streaming these to the various TVs is hit and miss though because it is more dependant on format used. You can install PLEX to help with this but our model doesnt support transcoding (CPU not beefy enough) so pick carefully if you want to go that route.

I had a QNAP 209II system before the synology, but that broke :(

wired vs wireless... I'd go wired every time, but then I have the luxury of Cat5e wiring all round the house - benefit of buying a house needing work ;) You can of course site the NAS next to your router and use one of those ports but this could be noisy due to the cooling fan on the unit. Ours is in the under the stairs cupboard so we just don't hear it.
 
Network sharing will be slow if you use windows sharing (SMB).

To get the throughput for HD films I needed, I used Hanewin NFS share which doubled the throughput.
 
NFS will be the quickest way for sharing as CIFs is so cumbersome with NAS. The alternate option is a SAN but somehow I think you wont find one under £1k!
 
I have a Synology DS213j with a couple of 3tb drives in.
Use it mainly for streaming to Kodi on my HTPC.
There are some decent apps for IOS which allows family members access to the NAS.
It was a doddle to setup and hasn't missed a beat in the year I've had it.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD
 
Another synology vote here...

I have the DS213+ with 2* 4TB WD red drives... been running continuously for 3-4 years now with no hiccups.

I use the apps on my iphone to share my music, video and pics and streams around the house to the smart tv/ chromecast to play my movies... had to move to homeplugs for 1080p films thought as the wireless couldnt manage it.

Can create some logins for my family to login to aswell as they can see the pics/ video's depending what you give them access too.

Also have 2 ip comera's connected in the house which record to it - and again another iphone app to view the camera's on my phone - without the hassle of port forwarding from the router.

Def one of the best bits of kit i bought - even the wife who has no idea on this stuff can use it!
 
I was running a freenas box with my WD Red drives...long story short, it worked out as I wanted it to, but it was a little OTT for my needs with regards to processing power, and didn't have enough ram to run as ZFS.

Swapped it out for a Netgear Readynas 104 and have been very happy indeed.

It currently plays nicely with all the devices in the house (Kodi boxes attached to the tvs, iOS, OSX and Windows)
 
pvr said:
Network sharing will be slow if you use windows sharing (SMB).

To get the throughput for HD films I needed, I used Hanewin NFS share which doubled the throughput.
Click to expand...

Not true. I have approx. 20TB shared over Cat5 to XBMC (Kodi) boxes using SMB and have no issues streaming full uncompressed bluray. One is even hooked up on a powerline adaptor in the bedroom and has zero issues playing the files.
 
I have an old Readynas Duo at home and to be honest despite its age it still manages to stream a HD film to my smart TV
Got 2 x 1Tb drives mirrored and I connect it using powerline adapters through my mains wiring via the router.
I have just changed them to include a WIFI extender as my router is at the other end of the house from the lounge.
The ones I have are 300mb/s and work a treat -

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00DHB2T44/ref=pe_385721_51767431_TE_dp_1

Chris
 
T2FFN said:
pvr said:
Network sharing will be slow if you use windows sharing (SMB).

To get the throughput for HD films I needed, I used Hanewin NFS share which doubled the throughput.
Click to expand...

Not true. I have approx. 20TB shared over Cat5 to XBMC (Kodi) boxes using SMB and have no issues streaming full uncompressed bluray. One is even hooked up on a powerline adaptor in the bedroom and has zero issues playing the files.
Click to expand...

Not true for you perhaps, but I did qualify that I needed to use the faster NFS configurations for the streaming to be successful. However my network is a commercial setup so not the average household traffic. If the OP is designing a configuration with multiple clients he might want to use the fastest config to start of with rather than something that works in a light environment.
 
T2FFN said:
pvr said:
Network sharing will be slow if you use windows sharing (SMB).

To get the throughput for HD films I needed, I used Hanewin NFS share which doubled the throughput.
Click to expand...

Not true. I have approx. 20TB shared over Cat5 to XBMC (Kodi) boxes using SMB and have no issues streaming full uncompressed bluray. One is even hooked up on a powerline adaptor in the bedroom and has zero issues playing the files.
Click to expand...
+1

It really depends on the NAS box you have and the media player(s) that you're using, some devices have crap CIFS drivers/protocol stacks but decent NFS, and vice versa for others, worse case scenario is that you get a NAS box that's good with one of them and a media player that's good with the other - then you're stuck with working out the 'least worst' solution :wink:

Always worth having a look on product support/user forums before buying to ensure you get a handle on both the good and bad points
 
pvr said:
Not true for you perhaps, but I did qualify that I needed to use the faster NFS configurations for the streaming to be successful. However my network is a commercial setup so not the average household traffic. If the OP is designing a configuration with multiple clients he might want to use the fastest config to start of with rather than something that works in a light environment.
Click to expand...
NFS is more efficient and is (theoretically) slightly faster especially over a WAN but, in the real world, home users will have a single LAN segment and any speed differences will (most likely) be down to hardware and driver optimisation rather than any speed difference between CIFS & NFS.

I always recommend to people that, for home networking, they should KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and if people already have Windows-based PCs and are going to use them with a NAS unit, I'd strongly recommend that they stick with CIFS if at all possible - on the other hand, if they're Linux freaks, NFS would make more sense for them....

If they're an Apple household all of this will be irrelevant as they'll just turn it on and expect it to work... if it doesn't, they'll go stand in a queue and buy the latest iMac/iPhone/iPad/Apple TV... :evil:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom