NAS Choice for Media?

[Enquiries]

I have my movies, Time Machine and photos on a WD Duo in RAID 1 which I then back up to seperate portable USB drives. All connected to my iMac. All works well but I would like a neater solution and I am thinking about a 4 bay NAS, for example as a cost effective solution and run it as a JBOD with

Drive 0 for Movies and Photos,
Drive 1 as backup for 0
Drive 2 for other stuff like time machine and files
Drive 3 as backup for that

Or a 2 bay and use my external usb drives as backup

So the intention would be to then connect it to my wired intranet in my house and run Plex as I do now from my Fire Cube 4k. I assume I would need to install the Plex server from the app list on the NAS. I dont think I need a RAID anymore for simple file storage and access or do I ? Backing up via Carbon Copy Cloner is my software of choice. This will free up my iMac a bit as it needs to be always on for my current DAS although it more than copes and if I ever need to transcode the processor will cope being an i7 4 core 8 threads. My movie files are 1080p and I stream to a 4K TV with the benefit of upscaling at the TV.

Am I looking at this the right way ? I don’t have any files that I use a lot other than movies and the advantage of a NAS would be always available on the intranet so maybe I’m swapping a DAS for a NAS. Its doing the same thing ? And I’m not a heavy user. So long story short. Should I go 2 or 4 bay NAS and which one ? Or even just stick with what I do now


As always, many thanks

Gary

[ed]

Having external backups is safe in case someone steals your storage device. But it is also not automated and can be forgotten to backup.Having a NAS you can do a 0/1/2/3 approach. And you can even automate backup to another NAS (2 bay +1 bay backup etc.) and also the cloud.Plex server would run better on a Celeron based model like DS420+ / 920+. You would also get an option to upgrade and expand later.There will be also enough power left to run time machines backups and more.I hope this helps.