Electronics Wizardy

1 computer is probably better, but depends on your exact goals. Lot of options, probably used office pc or other low power system is the way to go unless you want a rack server for some reason. How much usable storage do you need? Basic plex and jellyfin will run on almost any semi moden system so really depends on yoru exact needs.

If you want to switch from mirrors to parity your best way to do it would be to add a parity virtual disk, then copy the data over, and shrink the mirror one and expand the parity one while doing this. I'd probably be easier if you just started fresh and restore backups though. With mirrors in storage spaces you can add a 3rd drive and get 50% of the total space as its not a traditional raid 1.

How many streams are we thinking? What codecs? I'd guess 1080p will be fine, you can also likely use your igpu here.

we really need to stop using mah to measure battery capacity. The macbook air has a ~50wh battery which is much bigger than most phonse that are in the 10-20wh range.

are there bit for bit duplicates or simmilar files? check out czkawka, pretty good duplicate removal program.

There should also be public adblocking DNS servers you can use. I'd try using those first and see if they meet your needs.

Is there a big market for these laptops? Nvidia seems to have make them the 'better' brand for consumers, which likely helps drive sales over other brands. Better power efficiency helps too. I can see this making some sense with the right price, but with 4060 laptops being fairly cheap, I think it leaves a pretty small spot in the market for these.

I don't see a reason why it wouldn't be possible, but Nvidia seems pretty locked into the gaming laptop market with there geforce branding and better power efficiency. Intel likely gives discounts if you get a intel CPU + GPU which is why a few of those exist.

I'd backup the nas. Delete the pool, then make a new raid 5 one,

It looks like the 2 data drives are striped, or raid0 basically. IDK why you have 2 spares, I'd just make a 4 drive raid5 / raidz1

Not significantly. Look here, all the reasonbly high end drives are extremly close in performance. https://www.techpowerup.com/review/crucial-t700-pro-4-tb/16.html Its gonna be way faster than a HDD, but the pcie gen doesn't matter for almost all workloads.

For media use over a 1gbe link, your not gonna really help performance much here by adding a SSD. The best is probably a cache drive, but it won't help much with this use case. Metadata probably won't help with big files, and if it fails you lose all your data. Log won't help over SMB and general fileserver use at all.

Make a shared folder on the synology. Here is their guide. https://kb.synology.com/en-global/DSM/help/DSM/AdminCenter/file_share_create?version=7 Then go under this pc, then map a network drive and it will show up as a drive letter on windows.

You can mount the NAS drive in your OS, then it should show up likeanouther drive, and won't use any external disk space.

Got any example models you can show? I wouldn't be surprised if readout speed is the issue. Lots of sensors are high res, but can't read the full res of the sensor ~30 times a second needed for 4k video. So they switch to a lower res mode that can do ~30fps readout, but at a lower resolution. Could easily be an artificial limit too. Also arguably 4k doesn't matter for these low end sensors and phones if the lens and sensor isn't good enough to really have a significant difference, why make the bigger files.