I bought WD Red Pros, which are supposed to be made for use in a NAS. They’re pretty loud. It’s sitting right next to my couch and it a bit annoying. It’s always doing something, even when I’m not doing anything. When backups fire up at 3am they go nuts.
Thankfully, I don’t hear it when I’m trying to sleep. I do use a white noise machine, so that could be part of the reason why.
SSD prices are coming down. I can see they tempting me in the future to get a completely silent NAS.
I went with Synology for my Plex sever. I chose to use a docker container to run it instead of the normal Plex server app they have available. I found some YouTube videos on the setup and it was fairly straight forward. Now that it’s setup I rarely have to think about it, other than the occasional update. I now have to update the docker image instead of just letting Plex update itself.
I went this route because I didn’t want to have to maintain a desktop for my Plex server, which I had done since Plex was first released. But I also didn’t want to have a new sys admin hobby just to watch some videos. Rolling my own raid felt like it would end up that way.
I don’t. I let people use Netflix, Dropbox, or whatever. Those are made for non-technical users, have 24/7/365 monitoring and support, it seem to be what most people actually want, and they have teams of people for device support (or the individual user can find a service that supports their devices).
Any time I’ve tried to show friends or family some cool thing I setup that they can use, they don’t actually want it and I feel like I’m forcing it on them; they are just trying it while I’m there to be nice. So I don’t bother anymore.
Not to mention I don’t want to deal with the inevitable support calls, or oddly worse, hearing through the grape vine that it hasn’t been working, but they didn’t tell me, so I feel like an ass because this thing I told them was great isn’t working for them and they think it’s their fault, or don’t want to be bother me, or whatever.
Worth noting, bots are now better than humans at captcha.
From what I’ve read there is a hard floor to HDD drives due to what physically needs to go into them, so at some point (probably around $50, the HDD should stop dropping.