I'm slowly running out of space on my home computer and I don't want to just buy another hard drive, I want to grab a 4-bay NAS device. I've been doing some research the past couple days, and every review site (even Plex's list of compatible hardware) seems to make on-device transcoding a big selling point, and they don't really bring up how well the device transfers data if you are using it as a storage device. I will be using eSATA unless there's a better option for transferring data to the computer from the device. If I don't care about on-device transcoding or loading PMS onto the device itself, does it really matter which device I choose? Is there one that favors transfer rates and data delivery over the ability to load apps and run Plex from it directly?
There's some QNAP and Synology diskless devices that are pretty cheap on Amazon and NewEgg right now, and 4TB WD red drives are around $100 each. I'll be running a raid, most likely RAID10 for redundancy and speed (not a fan of RAID5 unless the performance of that raid setup in these devices is comparable, I've only dealt with raids in servers and larger SAN and NAS devices in the corporate world, not so much on a small scale).
Does the CPU and memory make that much of a difference in these little devices when just using them as storage and serving media?
There's a Synology DS416 for $338 and a QNAP TS-451-US on NewEgg for $396 (both Diskless, although Newegg has the QNAP one with 4 3TB drives for just shy of $800) and I'm looking at the WD red NAS drives, probably 3TB or 4TB, wanting to spend less than $100 for the drives.
Thanks for any help/assistance/info anyone can give me.