Network Attached Storage (or NAS as you know it) has become a buzzword in last few years, thanks to the evolution of smart devices being able to play media. Another aspect of this utility is a Home Theater system which allows consumers to play media available within the home Wi-Fi network on their big screen TV.
As you may or may not be aware, I have a decent amount of home videos and pictures stored on my external USB drive and I am constantly thinking about 2 things. First, they are priceless in the sense that once gone (as a result of disk gone bad or some other catastrophic failure), they can't be recovered and second, I want to be able to play it on my big screen TV, my tablet, my phone as well as my laptop(s).
So, my research for that perfect solution led me to explore quite a few options in past few months (say a year). But before I go ahead and talk about those options, I want to stress more on the things that I want to be able to do.
As it turns out, I have a huge amount of music and video collected over the years and given an option, I would also like that to be available 24/7 to be playable on my big screen TV. Most of the video content is 1080p (like the home videos) and they are all in different format (mkv mp4 m2ts etc). So I can say, these were my points of focus.
Storage: Storage is never enough, especially if you are talking about high definition media. I know that my collection will keep growing and with the amount of high-def movies, my 1 TB USB drive was almost full. Now this is probably the most trivial issue and probably the easiest to solve. Just buy a bigger one (today 2 TB USB 3.0 storage is available at a fairly good price) and toss the old one. Now once I have a bigger drive, what am I going to do with the smaller device. The resale value of old electronics is not a surprise to anyone and I hate to be the one throwing things working in perfect condition. Plus the USB drive wants me to have it plugged it to a computer (desktop or laptop) and having it available 24/7 means that computer has to be up 24/7, not something I am keen on doing.
Backup: As I said earlier I can't afford to lose the home pictures and videos that I have taken over the years and if that happens, it will be a huge blow to me (and I know my wife will never forgive me). To solve this the hard way, you buy another equally bigger drive and connect it to the same computer and from time to time copy all the data from the first drive to the other, so the latest media is up to date in both these devices. If you are technically savvy, just write a few lines of script to automatically sync the data every week (or everyday if you like) and you don't have to worry about this ever. The biggest problem here is the ability to have the computer up, all the time. This means your components are going to have more wear and tear and your electricity bill is going to be higher. That brings me to my next point.
Availability: I wanted my media to be available 24/7 on any device of my choice. This means something that does not consume much power but still provide me access to my media to all my devices (TV, tablet, smartphone and laptop). This means that if my device is not capable of playing the format of the media, my system should be able to transcode (in plain words, convert to appropriate format on the fly) the media to a format which the device can play.
Other: Other nice to have features should be to provide a nice user interface for me to browse my movies, to be able to continue where I left off. Also it would be nice to download subtitles from internet automatically for my movies. I would also love to queue torrents to be downloaded without having to keep my desktop running overnight. It would also be nice to be able to take a picture from my phone and upload it to this system (like my own personal cloud).
There are different kind of solutions that I looked at and they mainly fall into the following categories.
Windows/Linux based desktop solutions: Since this is a full fledged computer, you can connect your USB drives (containing media) to this, download free DLNA based media server applications (like XBMC or Serviio) and use smart devices (see below) to playback this media. There are a few problems with this. One is the power that a full fledged PC is going to consume. Also for some reason I am always afraid that one day something is going to happen to Windows and it is going to take all my data with it (trust me this is possible). I used this mechanism for a few years until I created my own solution.
Smartbox: This could be a smart TV, a smart DVD player connected to your TV or separate smart box such as Roku, Chromecast or Apple TV. It does not matter what you choose, but what is important is that these things should have enough processing power to be able to deal with high-def encoded media.
Ready made NAS boxes: There are a few companies which provide a good solution for a NAS. They have a small footprint and they have backup inbuilt (most case using RAID). Symbology and QNAP are one of the big names. But when I was looking at them I found that for the price point, their functionality is very limited. All of them run proprietary software so you are at their mercy if you want to add features. The processing power for the price was not enough for me to look into them. To give you an idea, a 1 GHz processor system will cost you at least $200 (with only 2 drive slot). If you are looking for more horse power and more storage, you are going to have to shell out at least $4-500 and I am not even sure they can be easily upgraded. If you know me well, you would know that I am not a person who likes to be stuck at the mercy of the manufacturer.
Don't get me wrong. The ready-made NAS devices are close to perfect solution for someone who does not want to make their hands dirty, but it wasn't cutting it for me. Then I started looking at customized NAS boxes and found that DIY NAS are the most popular kind of NAS presently. I will try to list some pros and cons for a DIY NAS
Pros:
As you may or may not be aware, I have a decent amount of home videos and pictures stored on my external USB drive and I am constantly thinking about 2 things. First, they are priceless in the sense that once gone (as a result of disk gone bad or some other catastrophic failure), they can't be recovered and second, I want to be able to play it on my big screen TV, my tablet, my phone as well as my laptop(s).
So, my research for that perfect solution led me to explore quite a few options in past few months (say a year). But before I go ahead and talk about those options, I want to stress more on the things that I want to be able to do.
As it turns out, I have a huge amount of music and video collected over the years and given an option, I would also like that to be available 24/7 to be playable on my big screen TV. Most of the video content is 1080p (like the home videos) and they are all in different format (mkv mp4 m2ts etc). So I can say, these were my points of focus.
Storage: Storage is never enough, especially if you are talking about high definition media. I know that my collection will keep growing and with the amount of high-def movies, my 1 TB USB drive was almost full. Now this is probably the most trivial issue and probably the easiest to solve. Just buy a bigger one (today 2 TB USB 3.0 storage is available at a fairly good price) and toss the old one. Now once I have a bigger drive, what am I going to do with the smaller device. The resale value of old electronics is not a surprise to anyone and I hate to be the one throwing things working in perfect condition. Plus the USB drive wants me to have it plugged it to a computer (desktop or laptop) and having it available 24/7 means that computer has to be up 24/7, not something I am keen on doing.
Backup: As I said earlier I can't afford to lose the home pictures and videos that I have taken over the years and if that happens, it will be a huge blow to me (and I know my wife will never forgive me). To solve this the hard way, you buy another equally bigger drive and connect it to the same computer and from time to time copy all the data from the first drive to the other, so the latest media is up to date in both these devices. If you are technically savvy, just write a few lines of script to automatically sync the data every week (or everyday if you like) and you don't have to worry about this ever. The biggest problem here is the ability to have the computer up, all the time. This means your components are going to have more wear and tear and your electricity bill is going to be higher. That brings me to my next point.
Availability: I wanted my media to be available 24/7 on any device of my choice. This means something that does not consume much power but still provide me access to my media to all my devices (TV, tablet, smartphone and laptop). This means that if my device is not capable of playing the format of the media, my system should be able to transcode (in plain words, convert to appropriate format on the fly) the media to a format which the device can play.
Other: Other nice to have features should be to provide a nice user interface for me to browse my movies, to be able to continue where I left off. Also it would be nice to download subtitles from internet automatically for my movies. I would also love to queue torrents to be downloaded without having to keep my desktop running overnight. It would also be nice to be able to take a picture from my phone and upload it to this system (like my own personal cloud).
There are different kind of solutions that I looked at and they mainly fall into the following categories.
Windows/Linux based desktop solutions: Since this is a full fledged computer, you can connect your USB drives (containing media) to this, download free DLNA based media server applications (like XBMC or Serviio) and use smart devices (see below) to playback this media. There are a few problems with this. One is the power that a full fledged PC is going to consume. Also for some reason I am always afraid that one day something is going to happen to Windows and it is going to take all my data with it (trust me this is possible). I used this mechanism for a few years until I created my own solution.
Smartbox: This could be a smart TV, a smart DVD player connected to your TV or separate smart box such as Roku, Chromecast or Apple TV. It does not matter what you choose, but what is important is that these things should have enough processing power to be able to deal with high-def encoded media.
Ready made NAS boxes: There are a few companies which provide a good solution for a NAS. They have a small footprint and they have backup inbuilt (most case using RAID). Symbology and QNAP are one of the big names. But when I was looking at them I found that for the price point, their functionality is very limited. All of them run proprietary software so you are at their mercy if you want to add features. The processing power for the price was not enough for me to look into them. To give you an idea, a 1 GHz processor system will cost you at least $200 (with only 2 drive slot). If you are looking for more horse power and more storage, you are going to have to shell out at least $4-500 and I am not even sure they can be easily upgraded. If you know me well, you would know that I am not a person who likes to be stuck at the mercy of the manufacturer.
Don't get me wrong. The ready-made NAS devices are close to perfect solution for someone who does not want to make their hands dirty, but it wasn't cutting it for me. Then I started looking at customized NAS boxes and found that DIY NAS are the most popular kind of NAS presently. I will try to list some pros and cons for a DIY NAS
Pros:
- Since this is a real PC, you can pick and choose the components you want to put here
- Since you build it yourself, it is going to be far more cheaper for the kind of powerhouse it provides. To give you an idea my kickass NAS costed me close to $450 (plus my time in building it)
- You can upgrage the system parts wide. i.e you can add more memory, HDD, upgrade your CPU etc.
- Making something yourself gives you a sense of accomplishment
- Since this is a real PC with a real operating system (more on this later), there is tons of help available online by opensource developers
- Since this does not run proprietary software (to some extent) you can add more functionality to it if need arises.
- This is going to be a little pain in the neck, if you are not handy
- You are going to have to take time to build the hardware and install/configure the software.
- You may have to do the software installation multiple number of times (if you don't know what you are doing) in the beginning, until you get it right. If you read the documentation and follow the steps, correctly, you will be fine the first time.
