Shopping for a "cloud storage" and streaming solution.

[Scruffy90]

I'm shopping around for a NAS solution and have no clue what to get. I have seen a few of them go on sale this week, but am also considering building one.

 

It will primarily be used to stream movies to the TV's and phones (remotely as well). I will also be using it to access docs when I am away from home. Must also be relatively small. I will not be the only one using the device, so it must be simply enough for a tech illiterate to use as well.

 

Suggestions?

*Budgets <$300

[Scruffy90]

Bump

[braneopbru]

With a budget under $300, you can rule out building your own.

 

For what you want to do, you can rule out a $300 budget.

 

About $200 will buy a nice Qnap or Synology enclosure. Both are nice, small units with super easy to use interfaces and way to access your files from outside the home. But at that price you're going to get JUST the enclosure. You still need to provide your own drives.

 

Plex has software for both Synology and Qnap NAS units that will allow you to stream media to tvs and phones BUT on those cheaper ARM cpu devices you will NOT be able to do transcoding. what that means is you have to download all your movies in the EXACT format that your TV supports or transcode them to that format on your computer first before saving them on the NAS. If you want to stream to your mobile devices, you'll also have to keep a second copy of the movie on the NAS transcoded to a format and bandwidth that's mobile friendly. You need to step up to the MUCH more expensive Intel based units to be able to do transcode on the fly.