As this community is just starting, I thought learning more about each other’s setups would be interesting.
I’ll go first:
- DS916
- 4x8TB Hard Drives: 3 WD Reds, 1 Seagate Ironwolf (oldest drive is 53,150 hours or just over 6 years)
I haven’t had to replace anything yet (knock on wood)!
Man, almost anything now. Transcoding isn’t really needed very often since streaming sticks (Roku, AppleTV, Fire, etc) now reliably have hardware video decoders. So, almost all the NAS has to do is shove the file over the network. Almost the only way you’d need transcoding is if you wanted to stream video out of your home network to remote devices.
So, if my guess that you won’t need transcoding is correct, then just buy the cheapest NAS that has a couple drive bays.
(There is such a thing as too slow. I have a 2014-vintage Synology DS214se, which was the low end model even then, and Plex clients take up to a minute to load all movie posters, and it can take a minute for a video stream to start. But if you are buying something made in the past few years this won’t really be an issue.)
The Synology DS220j would probably be my pick for that. Or maybe the 120j if you don’t care about data redundancy.