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.
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.
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.