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Question for NAS sickos: Are cheaper/older devices like the Asustor AS1102t or the Synology Ds223j a terrible purchase, or are they basically functional?
My use case is a media and file server that talks to my LAN. I don't have a huge pile of data I'm trying to store, here, so two drive bays ought to be enough for a long time.
Also, are NAS hard drives a real thing that you need or simply a way for Seagate to slap a markup on a hard drive?
extremely notice NAS sicko. there could be issues for the "media server" part of your use case, since you'd need to have some sort of gpu in the NAS to hardware encode streams. that can totally be the integrated gpu that most cpu's have built in, but there needs to be something.
how much of a problem it'd be really depends on what you're streaming, and where it's going. if you'd just be streaming over ethernet to a gaming PC with a full on GPU, you could just skip hardware encoding on the NAS and have your PC handle it. but for streaming to a device outside your LAN, or to a lower powered thing like device plugged into your TV, you'd really want to be able to encode on the NAS itself.
idk enough about those specific devices to know their video encoding capabilities, but i'm sure you can find that.
Transcoding usually isn't necessary for local streaming ime; unless you have media files encoded in exotic or cutting-edge formats most low-powered devices will ingest the raw files without any trouble.
The issues only start to show up if you have especially old devices or you have files that are encoded weirdly; in those cases transcoding can be necessary to get the file into a format that it likes (I've run into that a handful of times with plex->chromecast streaming).
And in any case, both the AS1102t and Ds223j have integrated GPUs and support encoding/decoding common video formats.
Nas drives are largely just Branding. I usually rec people grab Seagate Exos as they're basically the same as their NAS drives but without some data center-specific features
