Build it, or buy it?

[Silent Node]

I'm wanting to build or buy a NAS. Primary uses will be to back up my gaming desktop, serve Movies/TV and music to my A/V, access those files remotely (I travel frequently with work), and allow sharing of files with a couple friends (FTP?).

 

I don't need a ton of space (10TB should be more than enough), so figure a 2 disk RAID setup is likely. I don't want to spend "much", and every time I try to put something together with pcpartpicker the cost tend to climb rather quickly.

 

Looking for suggestions. I have no problem with a prebuilt solution, than may even be preferable for ease of setup and maintenance.

[RollinLower]

imo if you are going to be counting on reliability and ease of maintenance than a prebuilt would be the way to go. 

synology makes some fantastic prebuilt solutions, tough they can get a bit pricey. 

 

alternatively you could get a cheap WD MyCloud and take out the drives to drop in your own higher capacity ones. that should be a pretty cheap solution, tough i have no experience with WD's NAS systems so i dunno what reliability is like.

[NelizMastr]

If you intend to keep it affordable, 2 10TB drives and a 2-bay Synology NAS should be possible for around the $1000-1200 mark. The DS218+ is the one to get if you also intend to do media transcoding through Plex or Emby. If not, the regular DS218 will save you $100.

[Silent Node]

15 hours ago, RollinLower said:

imo if you are going to be counting on reliability and ease of maintenance than a prebuilt would be the way to go. 

synology makes some fantastic prebuilt solutions, tough they can get a bit pricey. 

 

alternatively you could get a cheap WD MyCloud and take out the drives to drop in your own higher capacity ones. that should be a pretty cheap solution, tough i have no experience with WD's NAS systems so i dunno what reliability is like.

Well, that's two votes for Synology (which was the prebuilt I was looking at already). Thanks to @NelizMastr for bringing up transcoding, I forgot to mention that in my post. I do use PLEX, so that's a thing. If my receiver can deal with the encoding of the actual file though then that isn't needed? What mean to ask is, if I make sure that the files saved to my DNLA share are already formatted in a way that my device understands then PLEX isn't going to "do anything" to them when I go to access them "and everything just works". Am I right?

[00100000]

Gah, prebuilts are so expensive... well most of them anyways