NAS or MicroServer (or ???) for centralised home digital media

[d000hg]

Following on from my previous thread about getting HiFi stuff, I bought a traditional separate setup augmented with Google Chromecast Audio (with more CC for other rooms) instead of going Sonos.

I didn't buy a CD separate as I reckon it's not much difference in price to have a digital library accessible over WiFi - probably using Plex(?) - for my local content that isn't available on Amazon Prime which is my streaming service of choice.

As I understand it I need two things to stream audio (and video if I wanted) around:
1)An always on data store device
2)A server to do the streaming/decoding

So I know I can get a NAS which IIRC is a network drive with a very basic server... I've seen Plex can run on several NAS in a limited fashion ie audio-only.
I also believe I can get a USB drive and plug it into my router, this is then just a drive with no CPU at all.
Then I can have a server running full-time... either with it's own storage, or serving up content from some network drive (I assume).

I've seen people here recommending microservers over the years so I wondered what recommendations and knowledge people might be able to share?

I should say my main focus is on audio here. I don't have much local video and while ChromeCast can't stream from network storage as far as I know, mobile devices might be able to, thus avoiding the need for a Plex server for me to view video content on my iPad, etc.

[northernladuk]

I thought the micro servers were mentioned because the HP ones were going cheap at the time and some of the clever people wanted to use the server capability as well. The NAS drives seem more than capable for what you want.

For me the NAS is a no brainer for the audio streaming as well as cloud and backup. You don't indicate these are a priority for you. My old 212J does it all fine.
This page reviews them actually using plex as part of the test so exactly as you plan to use it so might help.

https://www.techhive.com/article/314...nd-backup.html

[Hobosapien]

You only need to worry about a proper media server if your files are in a format not directly compatible with whatever device you'll be doing the streaming via, particularly for video streaming where on the fly format conversion is possible and sometimes necessary.

Many recent TVs come with some sort of networking and basic media streaming capability. Otherwise a cheap media player that can support all you need and offers simple NAS/USB hookup is worth looking into, if you haven't got something suitable already.

For just music (i.e. MP3 or one of the better quality lossless formats such as FLAC) you may not need anything that sophisticated and may already have the basic capability so just need a USB drive or basic NAS for storage and no need to pay extra for the bells and whistles if you don't need them or expect to in the future. Depends how much quality you want in the playback as to whether something better than via TV or current solution is required.

Unless you're locating the NAS somewhere well out of the way I'd worry about noise as a priority. Anything that uses HDDs rather than SDDs for storage will likely have at least one fan and none of them are truly silent.

SSD USB for storage is my current favourite approach. Cost of larger capacity drives coming down all the time. Totally silent too.

[sal]

Plex server runs on most off-the-shelf NAS, you only hit a wall with them if your video needs trans-coding, since their CPUs are underpowered. But it would be perfect for your audio needs.

The Microserver option is mostly an alternative to mid-high end 4+ bay NAS that cost a fortune for their pitiful specs. Will be overkill for you, unless you are future proofing. Unfortunately the greatest contender here the HP gen.8 is mostly out of stock being replaced by the mediocre gen.10 and the cashback deals are gone as far as I can tell.

[stek]

If you pay for the Plex Pass you can run PMS in the Cloud, ie Dropbox - prolly fine for audio.

[d000hg]

Thanks. Yes, the server aspect is just for doing any CPU work the consuming device can't - ChromeCast doesn't seem to do anything about from consume the stream so requires Plex for local storage.

As someone points out, a lot of smart TVs and mobile devices have the grunt/capability to do this on-board so will pull the raw data from a dumb drive.
DLNA fits inhere somewhere but I'm not sure if I need to figure this out or not.

Given my needs - mainly audio, but Plex or similar, it seems a low-end NAS is the sweet spot, a dumb USB drive plugged into my router isn't quite enough?

Plex have this handy Google-Sheet for compatibility, I found: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...gUxU0jdj3tmMPc

[gables]

I'm using a Lenovo EZ drive to server my music files, always on, in the cupboard with the router so can't hear any noise. Got a fair number of features if you want to use for more than just file serving.

[WTFH]

I’ve a Western Digital TV Hub (I think it’s called that) which has photos, videos and audio on it. It’s connected to the TV and is on the network. The music folder is then visible in the Sonos apps on computers/tablets/phones and we can play different music and different playlists through different speakers in the house.
I’m not sure of the quality of Chromecast Audio, but you might be able to do something similar.
If it was just for audio, then it would only need to be a storage device visible on the network, Sonos would do the rest.
One word of warning - your hub may have a USB port, but if it’s a BT hub, you may find that the port is pretty much useless.

[craig1]

My HP Microserver is getting long in the tooth but it still does more than any NAS box for the needs I have.

I run MS Home Server 2011 on it and use the iHomeServer plug-in to run it as a headless iTunes server. It does just enough other proper server stuff to make it still worthwhile from managing all my backups, to managing my ageing home security system and so on. It does fully back up to a chunky NAS box for backup and I simply unplug this and take it with me when I'm away from home overnight for my media needs.

If it dies, I'll may replace it with a cheap PC as I'm not too impressed with the latest HP Microservers. The only thing that the latest ones still have is a RAID controller and £200 is still cheap for a server that has virtually zero processing overhead need and with a RAID controller, regardless of how slow. As long as it can easily serve HD content then that's the highest overhead stuff I'll do.

[administrator]

I got a Synology machine a while ago, very impressed with it. Lots of features. I don't like Plex for music but love it for vids, have Plex pass and have a different machine with a decent GFX card for processing. The NAS has all the media backed up to it and I use the DS Audio app for my music library on mobile and just log in to the web interface at work to listen to tunes. Backs up all Mrs and kids' cloud services as well so their phone photos etc get doubly backed up. The DS Photo app looks good as well but need a week off to organise all of those

No experience of any other NAS boxes but happy to recommend this one. Need to get some servers backing up to it as well and lots more I could do with it if I had the time. Yes it's underpowered and you won't be able to do dev work on it etc but do all that on the mac now anyway so that was not an issue for me.