anyone using a NAS for their media/movie collection that can offer up a decent rec? thinking about doing this with my movie collection but have no idea where to start with NAS.
Do you have a computer already running Plex or do you need both server and/or storage? How many users do you plan to have? What type of devices will you be watching shows/movies from? Do you plan on having users that are watching Plex remotely?
Don't have a computer using plex...kinda wanna avoid having to have my computer on to use plex. just 1 user devices will be tv and ipad occasionally don't plan on having users watching plex remotely...though maybe in the future?
I use a QNAP for mine. 12 TB so it's not terribly big but just enough to fit all of my content. I run my server though on a quad-core i7 Mac Mini.
Start Here: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201373823-NAS-Devices-and-Limitations Is your content already in mp4/mkv? Depending on your content and the playback device, you'll need some transcoding power to "transcode" the video so your playback device can play it back. NAS are typically underpowered in this aspect, but since you only have 1-2 users at most, you should be okay. I personally would get a NAS that has an intel chip in it.
I set up a plex server using a Raspberry Pi 3. I think it's cheaper than a NAS and gives you some additional functionality. My Pi acts as a PiHole to keep all the ads out of my home network and a RetroPie gaming center. I used a normal internal hard drive and a sata to usb connection to hook up to the Pi. There are some problems transcoding, but if all of your videos are already in a format that your TV and Ipad can play it works just fine.
If you are trying to do what I described, I'd start with imaging a MicroSD card with the retro pie image which you can google. Then I used this as a guide to build the plex server: https://www.htpcguides.com/install-plex-media-server-on-raspberry-pi-2/ Finally you can google PiHole and th the instructions to install that are very easy