I’m looking to offload all my media from my main PC and make it accessible to other devices in my house. It’s likely to only be a few TB, probably 2 drives at most.
I’ve been trying to find a low-power solution since it will be running all the time. I do have a PoE switch, so it would be a bonus if it can run off PoE but not a requirement. I’ve been checking out a lot of the SBC’s that have become popular over the past couple years, but even the budget ones have gotten pretty expensive.
What are some good options?
You know that NAS can go in sleep mode, right? And wake up only when you try to activate them.
But what is the use-case? Only make your holiday films available to a media center? Or do you plan to also use it as a storage for other devices?
In the first case a sbc can do the trick (however can struggle if you share 4k). But I would definitely look into “real” NAS (Synology, qnas, etc.) before using a sbc.
It’s just for using as shared storage between several devices. Just receive files from whichever device I’m using, and serve them later to another device. Basically to replace having to use an external drive and swapping it between devices.
Any modern SBC is better than that crap.