Only have a bit of time, so this won't be as short and cogent as I would like...
Like the OP, about a year ago I started looking at NAS options, and there are many. As background, I've been using various Mac minis over the years to serve the household and business, and I've been generally happy with it. I saw the features that NAS would bring, but at the same time I had two other thoughts in the back of my mind - would a change bring or lose functionality, and how difficult would making that change be.
In the end, I decided to remain on MacOS and use DAS, but to get a bit more serious about it. The decision was driven by the fact that my needs just didn't support using a NAS and the changeover costs. I had (and still have) a lot of large hard drives, and they're all in various Apple formats (HFS/APFS) and encrypted. Just getting that data onto another box would have been an effort.
I bought a thunderbolt disk enclosure, and shucked the individual drives to place them into the 8-bay enclosure without any issue, which cleaned things up very nicely.
I also made the conscious decision to not implement any RAID (and yes, the "I" stands for
inexpensive). First of all, these are already backups of individual files stored on other Macs, so I'm OK with that - YMMV. Secondly, most of the files/assets are not all that valuable, and if I lose an entire disk, it wouldn't be the end of the world in any way. But this is me and my situation.
Another reason for not implementing RAID was power consumption and noise. I didn't want a whole array of disks spinning 24x7 when the usage pattern just didn't support that. A requirement was that the disks would spin down when not in use. Now, I'll admit I never found an answer on the NAS side for this, so it's possible that you can have RAID on a NAS that only spins up when someone is accessing files... but I never found any mention of that.
Now, if I want to convert to RAID at some point, I can still do so. But I haven't seen the need for it yet. But please, make your own considered decision on this. I do 3 2 1 but by spreading files around machines (so no lectures on backups please -
not all retained data is valuable).
I also upgraded the network to 2.5G, and am set to go to 10G if needed.
Before I get into the benefits of this approach, I didn't/won't have to:
- Select a NAS vendor, which is not a clear-cut exercise as one can see in posts above
- Have a learning curve on a new NAS OS
- Move data (days? weeks?)
- Buy additional disks just for moving data (not insignificant in my case)
- Have spinning disks 24x7 (probably)
- Faff around with RAID levels and adding/removing disks
What did I get? A reasonably robust file server that I'm familiar with and is supported that covers pretty much everything the OP was looking for. Turn on file, media and screen sharing and you have a fairly formidable platform.
The screen sharing is an ace in the hole for MacOS - specifically, high performance screen sharing. For those that have used Remote Desktop on Windows, it's the same thing. Both the screen and audio are piped to the viewing Mac, and it works
extremely well. You need AS Macs on both sides of the connection, but if you do, prepare yourself for a treat. Do note that only one person at a time can share the screen, but it brings you anything your server Mac can do right to your other Mac.
At the same time, the mini has an HDMI port so that gets connected to the 4k tv, and spare BT keyboard and trackpad complete the setup if I want to use it as a regular Mac.
Costs were fairly low for this; the 8-bay Thunderbolt enclosure was $750 and is both performant and solid physically. I did buy a m4 mini but didn't really need to, the m1 mini I had was sufficient. The disks I shucked. I have an external 2tb SSD on USB that stores my Photos library, which is shared via Home Sharing to AppleTVs.
Infuse handles the media side on ATVs and other Macs. I have not yet dipped my toes into *arr yet but that's probably coming. On the fence about Plex, as Infuse is working very well and not seeing a need for it, but as I understand it Plex will work with Infuse (yes I know Infuse is subscription and I hate those but it's working very well and I think there's a lifetime option which isn't all that expensive).
Frankly, things are working great, couldn't be happier. One thing the OP wanted that I haven't tried and am reluctant to do so is remote file access. It's a security hole I'm not going to open without good reason, and right now I don't have that reason.
A few things along the way:
- A minor nit, but just selecting "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" doesn't seem to work out of the box. I had to set the value via pmset a couple of times to get the disks to spin down, but we got there
- I love love love iStat menus for keeping an eye on my Macs and what they're up to, but in this case it was hitting the disks periodically and thus spinning them up. Even turning off all disk monitoring functions didn't help, so I got rid of it on the server entirely, which is sad, it's a great app and I have it on all my Macs
- The new m4 mini has HDMI CEC so it was turning on my TV when I didn't want it to. Fixed by a CEC blocker adapter
- While I could have the m4 server sleep altogether and wake it over the LAN, I decided the power draw was small enough to just leave it running. This also allows Photos to do photo analysis on the library whenever it sees fit.
- Also wake on lan related: on the m1 server I started with, with my upgrade of the network to 2.5G I used a USB ethernet adapter, and yep that doesn't work. It has to be directly attached via the ethernet port, so that nudged me toward adding the 10G option on the m4.
Overall I'd say DAS on Mac brings more benefits than many realize, and it can be economical and still performant with flexibility.
Sorry about the novel, I warned you!
