Home media + photography

[Enquiries]

Looking for a NAS for two purposes:
1. Storing my DSLR photos + Lightroom catalogue and gaming clips (gaming clips I dont need to edit off of the NAS, just storing).
2. Multimedia server. My family has one 4k movie, a few Bluray movies, some older DVD's and a sizeable collection of music and audiobooks on CD's, which I plan to digitize.
Since non-tech people will be using the files too, its important to have a mobile app for listening to stuff and a SmartTV&Mobile app to watch stuff. Based on my research so far, Plex would be the best, most used friendly option for this.

I'll set up the NAS, but will leave it at my family home, since they have a good and stable internet connection, and unlike me, wont be moving across the country in the coming years. Because of this, Im looking at prebuilt NAS' to have a solution that requires minimal maintenance.

A 4bay NAS seems to be the best price/performance for my use case, my plan is to start with 6+6TB in RAID1 (that should be enough for the start, but also leave some room to grow). The main contenders would be the Synology 920+ and the QNAP 464, in Finland they are very close in price, so I'm leaning towards the QNAP as it has a newer a newer CPU, a HDMI and 2.5g ports and it can take more RAM.

Questions:
Does the plan have any obvious flaws so far?
Any reason to take the Synology 920+ over the QNAP in this case?
How big of a cache SSD should I get for this? NAS m.2 SSD or any old SSD?
Anything else that I need to take into consideration?

[ed]

Yes, DS920+ and TS-464 is very popular models. But both of these models feature the same graphics chip.
By the sound of it, you will very likely use transcoding. Both of these NAS will perform very similarly. Having more RAM or cache will not change much because GPU is most important here.
I would pick Synology in this case. It is easier and safer to use when you are not an IT person. I would also use DS Video app for remote streaming. It copes much better with transcoding. But the bot support PLEX.


I hope this helps.

[Lucaemar]

Yes, DS920+ and TS-464 is very popular models. But both of these models feature the same graphics chip.
By the sound of it, you will very likely use transcoding. Both of these NAS will perform very similarly. Having more RAM or cache will not change much because GPU is most important here.
I would pick Synology in this case. It is easier and safer to use when you are not an IT person. I would also use DS Video app for remote streaming. It copes much better with transcoding. But the bot support PLEX.


I hope this helps.

Thank you!

DS Video doesnt have a native app for my TV, whereas Plex does.
Thats why I thought I'd use Plex, which is why I didnt place much extra value on Synology apps. Which in turn, makes the TS-464 look like better value with its better ethernet ports, more RAM, and HDMI.
Also, I dont expect more than 1 stream at a time, maybe 2 and like said, only one 4k movie, some are normal bluray and most old DVD. Audio streams might 2-3 at a time.

I have built many custom PCs, and watercool my own, so setup shouldnt be an issue - as long as I can do it dring my christmas holiday and wont have to spend several days configuring things.

The 2x500GB raid1 cache is how one is supposed to do things? Based on my best guess, 128GB cache should be enough too, but 500gb drives arent much more expensive, so I'd rather go for that extra space there.