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Would NAS or DAS make more sense in my home context? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 months ago by Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml to c/hardware@lemmy.ml
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I occasionally do some paid editing work in my home suite. I use a MBP and I just use whatever storage I have left on external drives or buy new ones as the project budget permits. Most of the time, my work is done on-site using a production company's facilities so it's not a big time operation here at home.

I also like to download and watch video over my wifi to to TV or my phone in other rooms of the house (don't typically move the laptop much). I tend to use the laptop's internal drive for that.

I'm beginning to outgrow my storage for both purposes, but only just. I could continue as I am for quite some time, deleting media at home after I watch it, and buying physically fairly small drives to put away in cupboards for work. However, I'm thinking I could fix both storage needs for a very long time by spending a bit bigger (but not MUCH), and getting a proper RAID. My mind immediately went to NAS, but it occurs to me that, that mightn't necessarily be the most cost effective or efficient way to go given the limited scope of my needs.

My home network is very slow consumer equipment, and I have no ethernet infrastructure at all. I thought I could maybe just hook the NAS up to the laptop via ethernet but then at that point, isn't that just DAS with the extra complications of networking? Would I need a switch between the 2? My home streaming is just done over wifi, since everything is compressed media anyway.

If I buy a decent thunderbolt DAS RAID and expose it to the wifi network via the laptop, would the costs stack up in terms of power consumption and wear and tear of the expensive lappy (given it'd be powered on nearly constantly)? Are there NAS devices that I can directly attach to the lappy for editing, but leave on and connected to wifi for home streaming? Would it need any additional networking equipment in that use case? Can I run jellyfin on it? I feel like a NAS doesn't make sense but would like help puzzling this out.

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[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Some routers are able to share files on USB devices, so that might be another option.

[–] Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

hmm. That is an interesting idea. I guess the router wouldn't have the juice to do anything other than serve up the file though? No running of jellyfin or transcoding on the fly for chromecast or anything like that?

[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

You would not wanna run jellyfin or any on-the-fly transcoding on anything but a dedicated device, my dude. Definitely wouldn't on a work laptop.

[–] Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The laptop can definitely handle it, both on paper and in practice in the actual scenario we're describing as well as for more demanding editing tasks, it does this task absolutely flawlessly as one might expect, I'm just unsure if I want to keep it running 24/7 for the home media streaming hence the possibility of a NAS or your router suggestion. But I can't picture a router having the resources to handle transcoding or really running much of anything. Granted though, it just serving up files to me without any kind of server software is tempting in it's simplicity.

[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I'm just unsure if I want to keep it running 24/7

This is exactly how I'd think about my daily driver. Unless the laptop you mentioned turns out to be a spare, that is...

You'd be surprised on what modern router got these days. I got a Linksys e8450 running OpenWRT on 512 MB of RAM and 1.35GHz of dual ARM core. Regardless I wouldn't want to push it as I'd be in great trouble if that thing goes down (my whole household depends on it).

I do believe that router can serve files with no issue, just that it'd be limited to the USB 2.0 that it has. I'd still want a dedicated device regardless just so that I won't feel bad about breaking it from time to time.

[–] maniel@sopuli.xyz 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

why not? technically MBP is more than capable of transcoding on the fly without breaking sweat, even a N100 based nas would do it in HW, the user experience of using a laptop for that is another thing

[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Because you'd need it for work, of course!

[–] maniel@sopuli.xyz 1 points 3 months ago

yeah, but you don't work if you watch a movie on a TV, op didn't mention multi user environment where laptop would do both at the same time

[–] Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The point of NAS is to be able to access it from multiple places and/or multiple devices without having to move the actual storage. If you are doing neither of those things then you probably don't need NAS. Another point is having scalable storage which might be the biggest pain when talking about a laptop, any laptop. A hub and multiple external enclosures can get you pretty far though.

It sounds like you use your own storage when you can't use the customer's.

If you're only sometimes need to do things at home and elsewhere with hot own storage, it's not really worth the hassle. However, if you'd like to start doing more stuff with your own storage while on the go, then NAS could be worth it.

How much data are we currently talking about here?

[–] Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

That's what I was thinking. My biggest home project are only a 1-2 TB max, and most are more in the order of 200-400GB. The type of DAS options I'm thinking of would be RAID systems. I'm fond of the LaCie ones just because of familiarity and relative reliability, but I do think they're overpriced and they went through a period a few years ago, of a pretty major quality dip. I haven't dealt with them much since but I think they seemed to have pulled themselves back up from that.

It's not a major concern that I'd spend a lot of money on, but the idea of self-hosting a little mini home netflix seems fun and I guess for that I'd want things to be always on. Ideally there'd be one piece of hardware for each purpose given it's a little unprofessional to host my home viewing content on the same storage as professional media, and I guess if the drives are always spinning then they'd wear faster just so they can be ready at a moment's notice for me to watch TV but I don't really have the space or money to buy dedicated equipment for each so I'm hoping to dual purpose here. There's always the option to buy a cheap 'passport' drive that's always connected to the laptop as the 'media server' for my jellyfin content and have the laptop be running the jellyfin server as it is now, it's just, I guess I wondered if that made less sense because I'll need more editing storage eventually anyway, and maybe running my very expensive laptop 24/7 would cost more in the long run than running a NAS.

[–] maniel@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I'd use a NAS connected to a router via a cable, everything else could be used wirelessly, AFAIK TVs wired network cards are shitty and wireless in many cases will be faster anyway (on of my TVs has 100Mb NIC...), if you want it cheap then buy some n100 based barebone NAS/router and install the NAS/RAID software solution by yourself, like TrueNAS (Scale recommended), unraid, proxmox, OpenMediaVault or... xpenology, for example i bought AOOSTAR R1, bought 2 4TB disks and installed xpenology, jellyfin hardware transcoding works with some tinkering (mainly reading documentation, not even touching any command line), mine looks nice near the TV and router

[–] Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I need it to dual purpose as central storage for editing though. That has no chance of working wirelessly. Whether NAS or DAS it'll have to be connected directly to the lappy to ever work for editing, but the N part of being NAS could be handy for the wireless streaming of compressed media for entertainment purposes. I can do that with DAS and using the laptop as the server part of the operation, but it might prove to be smarter to directly attach a NAS by cable to the lappy for editing and let it connect to wifi itself for serving up media to watch in the rest of the house. In that second scenario I guess I'd have the NAS running jellyfin or emby or whatever and running that NAS 24/7. Just not sure on which arrangement makes more sense and is most efficient and cost effective.

[–] maniel@sopuli.xyz 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

yeah, unfortunately with NAS it probably won't be as easy as connecting via usbc/thunderbolt and using it as a DAS, you'd need a proper network connection, you know, ethernet dongle, network setup, sharing etc.

[–] Stoposto@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I got myself a synology about 8 years ago for the same reasons you listed up. NAS storage local and out, while being able to run a few small services like Plex for streaming media (looking to try Jellyfin at some point).

There is a premium cost for the NAS but att I didn't want to fiddle around building my own and then setting up something like Unraid, which atm is running on and old laptop and might be my pick for my NAS solution in a few years.