Home use NAS recommended for beginner?

[PowerBaller]

I have little experience in home server and personal cloud. Recently my familes need a better media to store photos and other contents.

Primary purpose: Mild duty LAN storage and share center, download clients (not 24/7), light duty personal cloud (mostly small files and scripts) with mulitplatform remote access app.

Load: usually 1~3, but not more than 5 clients connect simutanoeusly 

UPS power: Already have.

ISP: 1Gbps/1Gbps

Budge (not inlude drives) : 300 USD

The options falls on models like Synology DS218+, QNAP TS251+ and other inferior models with less powerful processor. 

Base on the workload i expect, should i get the models with Intel processor? Non-Intel processor with more cores? Save the money with system and spend it on better drives? Or even break the budget on  a better model (DS718+) for furthur expansion?

[Electronics Wizardy]

From your listed workload the cpu won't matter much, copying files doesn't need much cpu at gigabit.

 

How many tb do you need? Those 8tb external drives are a great value now.

[PowerBaller]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

From your listed workload the cpu won't matter much, copying files doesn't need much cpu at gigabit.

 

How many tb do you need? Those 8tb external drives are a great value now.

For now around 10TB, not sure if raid is necessary. 

Will a good CPU benefits decoding (streaming), or buidling a dedicated HTPC is better?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, PowerBaller said:

For now around 10TB, not sure if raid is necessary. 

Will a good CPU benefits decoding (streaming), or buidling a dedicated HTPC is better?

what are you using for media? If you playing the files off aa network share, the cpu isn't doing anything, same with plex without transcoding.

 

For 10tb, id probalby get a 4 bay and 4x8tb drives.

[PowerBaller]

11 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

what are you using for media? If you playing the files off aa network share, the cpu isn't doing anything, same with plex without transcoding.

 

For 10tb, id probalby get a 4 bay and 4x8tb drives.

So as long as the files on the drive are alreay playable, a better CPU wont make much difference when streaming, except the type of codec they support?

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, PowerBaller said:

So as long as the files on the drive are alreay playable, a better CPU wont make much difference when streaming, except the type of codec they support?

 

unless the nas is transcoding video, streaming video is just a low speed copy of the video to the client, and any nas can easily do it.

[Bombastinator]

I was gonna mention a bunch of consumer grade solutions and point at that thing that was shown off in one of those CES articles.  10tb is too big for something like that I think though

[PowerBaller]

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

I was gonna mention a bunch of consumer grade solutions and point at that thing that was shown off in one of those CES articles.  10tb is too big for something like that I think though

Well i assume getting a entry to decent level product, and spend on the real deal once 10GbE NAS become comsumer grade is not a bad option either.