NAS or HTPC ? Revo or Mini vs Timecapsule or Synology

bl0at3r

Ex Member
Joined
Nov 18, 2012
Messages
718
Reaction score
206
Points
195
Location
UK
Not sure what I need (if anything)...

Currently have a fruity laptop, also some tablets of the fruit variety and a PS3.

Backup strategy is handled by 2x external usb3 drives (time machine and ccc) which I rotate offsite and also Dropbox. My entire music collection and photos fit on my 256Gb SSD with about 50gb to spare - so don't need hundreds of gigs of space. What I do need to do is remember to plug in the drives and swap them over - although Dropbox is running all the time - but obviously if there was a corrupt file or something was wrongly edited it would sync that to the cloud instantly.

I am considering ripping my bluray and dvd collections as well so storage needs would potentially increase significantly. I am researching the following (in no order or preference)...

1. Time Capsule / 2Tb / £249
2. Mac Mini / 500Gb / £499
3. Acer Revo L80 / 750Gb / £399
4. Synology 2bay NAS / 1Tb / £380

Any suggestions or comments please?

If I didn't go with the film ripping then I could probably make do with simply network based file storage and time machine backup destination. If I went with the film ripping then I would be looking at plex or similar so would want to stream to my ps3 or have something hooked up to the telly to play them (revo or mini) - or does a PS3 or Apple TV see a plex source and play films from it?
 
1. Useless for media streaming.
2. Can double as server and media player.
3. Same as 2.
4. Dedicated power efficient device meant to be left on 24/7 with little to no user maintenance, media streaming is supported but the media must be natively supported by the end client e.g PS3 supports mp4/m4v so convert your movies into that format.

Plex can be run on Synology NAS but unless your using something with an actual Plex client it's not recommended for basic DLNA clients, Plex is a CPU hungry app and the low power CPU's on NAS are stressed by Plex. The Synology default DLNA media server is fine for the PS3.

AppleTV only talks to iTunes nothing else, however you can Airplay from an iOS device media stored on the NAS using the provided Synology DSVideo app or any basic DLNA client, media must be mp4/m4v format too.

Synology also supports TimeMachine and have their own dropbox style service called Cloudstation though that uses your NAS as the storage.
 

The latest video from AVForums

Is 4K Blu-ray Worth It?
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Back
Top Bottom