Yo.
I’m new to the game. Like 2h fresh. I’m fairly technical, being a millennial and a programmer.
What I want to do, is to have a NAS server I can host movies from and watch them on my phone in my bed - or on my projector.
Extra points if I could host my ebooks and music there and run a torrent client. Extra extra points if I could connect to it from outside my home network (and stream)
I’ve read about about Plex and Jellyfin.
I’m here to ask you about hardware advice.
Will QNAP or Synology be enough for my needs and can I install custom software there? I don’t really want to create hardware from scratch.
Google says yes, but I trust reddit and random articles like I trust a fox not to eat chickens.
(Alternative below) Buy 5 - 7 years old computer with decent specs (i5 i7, 16 gigs ram, don’t care about hard drives but prefer ones with ssd) for about 60 - 100 bucks. Buy 250 gigz+ ssd (if it’s not included) and any desired number and sizes of nas grade drives (this is where you don’t want to save money if you want this full fledged nas). Don’t forget UPS! Install TrueNAS. Profit… Ok not profit but enjoy. For movies definitely jellyfin (keep your distance from plex really). Audiobookshelf for audiobooks but also ebooks! Amazing software that one.
Alt. Buy raspberry pi, two usb hard drives, install open media vault and same apps as above. Setup data duplication from one drive to the second one with rsync (directly in omv ui). Omv is not as polished as true nas but its cheap and it lets you dip your feet in homelabbing first, in two to three years you will gain experience and vision to do your dream homelab (or at last try 😀) if the pi is not enough.