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.
Some routers are able to share files on USB devices, so that might be another option.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
Because you’d need it for work, of course!
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
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
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.
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.
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.
