Yo.
I’m new to the game. Like 2h fresh. I’m fairly technical, being a millennial and a programmer.
What I want to do, is to have a NAS server I can host movies from and watch them on my phone in my bed - or on my projector.
Extra points if I could host my ebooks and music there and run a torrent client. Extra extra points if I could connect to it from outside my home network (and stream)
I’ve read about about Plex and Jellyfin.
I’m here to ask you about hardware advice.
Will QNAP or Synology be enough for my needs and can I install custom software there? I don’t really want to create hardware from scratch.
Google says yes, but I trust reddit and random articles like I trust a fox not to eat chickens.
Edit: preferably something with WOL that goes silent and fanless when not in use, or something I can shut down with a button
You said it yourself.
To start, if you’re using it to torrent your media then you’re going to want it running in the background because you need to see your torrents. Aside from it being the right thing to do, keeping a good ratio is necessary to get into good private trackers. And torrents aren’t great for music, at least not in my experience, so you’ll probably want soulseek as well. That also requires sharing in the background. You could buy a seedbox and torrent through that, but if you were going to go that route you could just do everything you’re trying to do through a seedbox instead of getting a NAS, and it wouldn’t take long for the subscription costs to surpass the costs of self hosting.
So now you’ve got qbittorrent, soulseek, Plex, and Kavita or similar for ebooks. What else could you want over time? Do you want to host audiobooks, too? Comics/manga/magazines? Maybe you want to streamline and automate the downloading process. Maybe your mom can’t stream her favorite show anymore so you decide to share your library with her. Maybe you want to be able to search and download anything from any device anywhere, and maybe you want your mom to be able to as well.
Why stop there. Maybe you want to self host your own file and picture cloud storage as well. Maybe Mom’s, too. Maybe you want to start blocking ads on your network at a DNS level. Maybe you want your phone to use your home network even when you’re out and about. The possibilities increase exponentially once you start getting into self hosting.
That being said I have a good number of the above tasks running on an HP elitedesk mini g9 and it stays pretty quiet. The spinning disks make noise though lol
Thank you~!
I want to spend as little time on it as I can. Then I’d like to minimize the initial cost of it, or at least cost of exploitation.
I’m fairly busy with my hobbies (Lego and Arkham Horror LCG), so I’m looking for the solution. I’d rather spend more money than more time.
On the other hand, if I waste money on garbage I’m going to be cross and do it from the scratch again, so I’m trying to hedge my options before I commit - if that makes sense.
Read this. I’ve got an m920q from Lenovo (I think it’s 920) and it does all of that. I want more Nas from it, and I might get another PC to be that, but it does great.
Totally fair. I’m actually in the process of building a dedicated Proxmox VM host / TrueNAS server to ease up on my little media server, but for a quiet and powerful yet economical little package these mini PCs are great for the task. After all this time the only modification I’ve had to make was adding a 2.5Gb compatible NIC.
Thank you for articulating what I was trying to get at with OP.