The plus series are a great choice if you are doing much with Docker. In particular, being able to add more RAM! I found a DS220+ open box at a nice discount on ebay. When you’re ready, don’t be afraid to be a cheerful bottom feeder :-)
bratling
joined 1 year ago
Man, almost anything now. Transcoding isn’t really needed very often since streaming sticks (Roku, AppleTV, Fire, etc) now reliably have hardware video decoders. So, almost all the NAS has to do is shove the file over the network. Almost the only way you’d need transcoding is if you wanted to stream video out of your home network to remote devices.
So, if my guess that you won’t need transcoding is correct, then just buy the cheapest NAS that has a couple drive bays.
(There is such a thing as too slow. I have a 2014-vintage Synology DS214se, which was the low end model even then, and Plex clients take up to a minute to load all movie posters, and it can take a minute for a video stream to start. But if you are buying something made in the past few years this won’t really be an issue.)
The Synology DS220j would probably be my pick for that. Or maybe the 120j if you don’t care about data redundancy.
https://drfrankenstein.co.uk/
^ Really good resource. Updated frequently and carefully, happy to help out via his Discord, and doesn’t beg for money.
Thanks for starting! I’m another refugee from Reddit.
I have two:
- DS220+ – 2x8TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro – primary device, running a bunch of containers including Plex (of course) and some actually useful ones like Paperless-ngx.
- DS214se – 2x4tb Western Digital Red (CMR) – backup target for the other one, i will be sending it to my dad to be my off-site. (I host his off-site at my home; the DS214se was a hand-me-down/gateway drug.)
This week I discovered that Porkbun DNS has a nice little API that makes it easy to update your DNS programmatically. I set up Quentin's DDNS Updater https://github.com/qdm12/ddns-updater
Setup is a little fiddly, as you have to write some JSON by hand, but once you've done that, it's done and done. (Potential upside: You could use another tool to manage or integrate by just emitting a JSON file.) This effectively gets me dynamic DNS updates.