Htpc vs nas or all in one

hello guys,

since i lik to have my media organised and automated. i was considering to buy a synology nas so all the downloading and cloud goes through it. after searching a lot i found i also need a compatible streamer for transcoding and a gigbit network to play bd blueray dts 5.1 over your network. now my questions goes. wil it work? comparing the download unpack renam replace and index tasks my htpc does and the heavy load it takes do do the stuff. im starting to dought weather to let a small 1.2 dualcore cpu with 2 gb of ram on a so called nas synology or asus do all the dirty work. and weathr a gigabit network is enough to acces and play the files at the same time without any lagness during playback

The consumer NAS units do have the power to do what they say on the tin, but you need to do your research before purchasing one, and make sure there are plenty of modules for you to download to get what you want done, as some are locked in pretty tight for options. Having said that, you can effectively run a server from just about anything, even a lowly netbook that can't run 1080p content itself, and have it serve up 1080p files quite fine, so long as it isn't transcoding. Add Windows 8's Storage Spaces technology, and it's a mighty tempting alternative.

Even 100Mb/s is 'enough' to play bluray across a network, I did a LOT of messing around with things several (4-5) years ago, and it depends on how much horsepower your htpc or really, your player box has, so a switched gigabit network is way more than enough, and is pretty cheap these days.

And the biggest thing I learned, after building two HTPC's, the first a dual-core and then a quad-core box, utilizing several top end graphics cards, was going with a stand-alone network player box. It all worked, but it's kinda like throwing a Porsche at something to go down to the local 7-11 for a Slurpee.

I came to the conclusion that a cheap stand-alone network player was the way to go. In my case, and at the time (this was some 5 years ago) that PCH (popcorn hour) was what I went with, as I wanted something that would play burned media (cd/dvd/blu) as well as stream from a NAS array.

On that subject, I looked around and figured that what you're buying is 'drive slots' and that the most cost effective around the 7 drive level, was Thecus. Pricing right now is about $2200 with dual-Atom CPU's (and 4GB ram) and 7/4TB drives.

A bit much, maybe, but that's 4x7 or 28TB total, 24TB if running RAID5. Figuring BD50's or therabouts (say 35GB per) that's around 700 images or so. If you decide to recode things, it's whatever level you decide your eye's can tolerate. Lots of folks do BD25's (25GB per and if you burn to disc it's 75cents per with inkjet printable media).

I do both, so my Raid array's (I have two, one built a couple years back with 3TB/18TB and the new one with the 4TB/24TB. That's a lot of storage but I already have plans on an upgrade path.

There are cheaper (both PCH and others) streaming boxes, but the PCH's I have do burned discs and few others do. If you rally wanted to low-ball the setup, I'd do a low-cost NAS array (say 2-4 disc) for things I either don't want to burn or for 'popular' storage, and do burned BE25's for long term storage.

What I came up with works for me, allowed for slowly adding storage over the years.