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Pastimes : Home Theater Systems - Designs, Products, Tips and Info

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To: Don Green who wrote (183)7/5/2019 4:20:58 AM
From: Zen Dollar Round  Read Replies (1) of 418
 
Thank you, and to follow on with that conversation, here was your latest reply to me, which I will respond to in the next post:

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J.F.
I understand your concerns about security but I find having the capability of accessing my media content when or where I want a huge benefit. When I put my NAS together I also considered various raid configurations and experimented with them but in the end decided for my needs raid was overkill. I basically ripped and loaded a large amount of video content onto my 8tb drive. At first I tried to estimate how much space I needed and experimented with different video formats to determine what size and format provided the best quality presentation. I ended up using mainly mkv and mp4. The biggest problem I found was how to properly back-up the data which took a long very long time to rip and organize. Early on I used raid 1 on 2 8tb drives. But after a few months and a few lengthy conversations with tech support at QNAP I decided the I really didn’t need to use raid. So I decided that I didn’t need to have the drives on 24/7 and didn’t need the benefits that raid offered. All I really needed was one 8tb drive which I could access and turn on and off remotely whenever I wanted to. I was disappointed I could not find a way to back-up clone the drive using Acronis and felt raid 1 mirroring was overkill because I didn’t want to leave to drives on all of the time when I was only accessing a few times a day and more often only a few times a week at most. I think 8tb is enough space for most people. I was surprised I had plenty of room. In fact once you get things organized you end up deleting things you really did need on the five and fine tuning your organization.

The real benefit of the NAS for me was gathering all of the content from DVD, video tape, photos, ebooks and pdf articles I had saved together and then organizing it and having access to it all from my phone, laptop or IPad from anywhere in the world.

So what I do now is I bought a separate 8tb usb external drive which I completely back-up all of the media files on to and store in a safe place away from potential damage and maybe once every 1 or 2 months update the drive after any additions or deletions or changes to the media on the NAS. For me Plex is the key it does everything for me. It can provide movie trailers, news, finds and updates music data to support my very large music collection, music better than ITunes or any other music management system I have tired. It can also be used as a DVR, which I don’t use because I am a long term TIvo user and can save programs from my Tivo and put on my NAS directly.

Overall my NAS has been one of the more enjoyable and worthwhile “hobbies” endeavors I have taken on in a very long time. It can be very time consuming organizing music, movies, books, ripping sporting events from old video tapes and loading photos in some sort or order. But once it is done it is very satisfying even if your family doesn’t appreciate it. lol

But you know!

Don
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