Taking the first steps

[drewex]

With black Friday coming up and my current 4T external HDD a few years of age now, expanding my storage has come up. Just adding more external HDD doesn't sound appealing and i would like to unload my plex/deluge on to a separate computer.

What I want:

• 10-20T of space 
• Plex
• Deluge
• transcoding 
• file storage (video,music,pictures,games,docs)
• remote access from computer possible phone

From what I've been able to find out my self I see 3 choice I can make.
A pre built NAS like a DS918+ with some WD red HDD in raid 5 for 1 disk failure. This would get me the space I want and from the synology forums someone has a package to get deluge working on them and plex is supported. 
The cons:

• lack of transcoding from low power cpus
• I don't believe you can remote launch games from here

A custom build this would all me to get all of the feature I wanted. Even with a few parts I could salvage from past build. 

The cons:

• Price 
• higher power draw 
• form factor is larger over a pre built nas
• did i say it was expensive

I have an old Toshiba laptop (a505-s6025 if it matters) and it got a few usb ports on it and i could just strap a few external HDD to it and run Teamviewer or chrome remote Desktop or something. And it cheap!

The cons:

• god this would look ugly
• low speeds from HDD
• not sure if the cpu could handle transcodeing 
• no drive redundancy 
• im not even 100% sure if this could work

I am currently leaning towards the Nas due to simplicity. With the duct tape laptop a 2nd due to affordability. However I may have over looked other issues and possibility. Thoughts?

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 hours ago, drewex said:

I don't believe you can remote launch games from here

What do you mean? DO you want to store the game files on the nas? If so most games can be installed and ran off a cifs/smb share, and for those that need local storage iscsi will work(which most nas boxes support)

 

Of the 2 options above Id get the nas. If you want to go diy id get a used desktop or server or a new low end desktop(think celeron or pentium). A laptop will just lead to problems.

 

 

[drewex]

Was not sure if you could play games from a nas storage since media went through plex if it would let me play with out downloading to local drive.
Thank you for you opinion.