Best $200 NAS compatible with Plex

[nikolaizombie1]

Im looking for a NAS that is under $200 with 2 or less bays that is compatible with Plex.

[Nattan]

at this price point you are probably better off buying an old tower off craigslist, adding a drive and using free nas which has a plex plugin

[Vitalius]

at this price point you are probably better off buying an old tower off craigslist, adding a drive and using free nas which has a plex plugin

This^

Honestly, if you are willing to buy used parts off of ebay, you can get a pretty powerful system for less than $200.

I got two 4 core Xeons (7 years old though), 32GB of RAM and a server motherboard for them for $235. Just as an example.

[Razor512]

Are you very concerned about having the lowest possible power consumption?

 

if not, and you do not mind having a larger device, then how do you feel about going with an old generation desktop PC e.g., a old core 2 duo based system http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=8945542&CatId=5138

 

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=9151133&CatId=5138

 

they usually go for around $100-150 depending on the specs, and for the price, they make great NAS devices, and will pretty much always have a faster CPU than what you would get from a $200 all in one purpose made NAS box

 

(the rest of the money can then be put into getting a 2-3TB hard drive)

 

If you go with a rack mount server, then you will likely get better hardware for less money, but when you go with this form factor, you get very loud fans, and thus it will have to be placed in a location where you will not be around (that is not a closet as they will overheat quickly)

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-CS24-SC-Server-2x-Intel-L5420-Quad-Core-Xeon-2-5-GHz-16GB-4x146GB-1U-Server-/141453702036?pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item20ef4c3394

 

e.g.,

 

Many servers lose their value quickly when they become obsolete for a traditional server environment, because they are difficult to to handle in a home environment. (If you are able to deal with noise equipment in your home, then a more traditional server will work well).

[ErrorNumber419]

Well, put it this way, for around $300 I just built my sister a full desktop with a higher end Pentium and a TUF series motherboard, and that included 1TB of storage. Go with a slightly cheaper case, a little cheaper motherboard, and a more reasonably sized power supply (430 W was a little overkill), and you have one hell of a plex server.

 

Remember that it really won't use that much ram, and a reasonably fast dual core is more than enough (unless you plan on running more than one or two streams at a time, both of which which require transcoding). And any NAS you buy won't even run one trascoding stream reasonably well.

 

By the time you buy a two or three bay NAS, you can easily buy a significantly better full system/server for the money which will wildly outperform the NAS in pretty every much every way possible. That and you don't have to worry about firmware supporting plex or it actually having enough CPU to do the job. You'll also get more that 2 bays worth of hard drive space.