@KEW Hey, man! Sorry for the late reply.
I wasn't NAS savvy myself, but I always knew I wanted to have a huge storage capacity accessible from anywhere in the house. I'll give you a few details and answers to the best of my knowledge.
I bought somewhat of as beast and it can do 32TB as it is, but could do 216TB if I upgrade RAM. It also has two USB 3.0 ports and can take two external HDD to further expand the storage capability.
In my bottom pic you can see a black HDD sitting on top of the NAS. It's a 1TB of music I acquired over the years. My lady playing one song on her laptop and me playing another on mine, no trouble at all. Later we tried with two different HD video files, works perfectly.
I have a projector in my bedroom and taking my laptop to a night stand, I can play anything from the NAS. I wanted to buy a wireless projector, but members here in AH said it can't be good enough. So this is a work around.
It has a Realtek RTD1296 4-core 1.4 GHz and is quite fast.
I bought mine exclusively for media playback. It has its own operating system, but so far I haven't installed any software on it. It is possible to have some organizers and players as far as I've seen, but I'm leaving that for later.
I really like things simple and I'm trying to use the NAS like some sort of a wireless memory stick - all members have access and no one has to have it plugged in his PC.
This is why I was hoping for a plug n' play solution like an external HDD would be, but it is more complicated than that.
Setup had me going through video clips on YouTube (luckily Synology has its own tutorials), and there's some work with logins, passwords, permissions (computer crowd is way to paranoid for me, I'd be happy with the thing not being accessible from the Internet, but I would keep it open for all in the household and that's it). It's asking you about groups of different clearance levels
and going through sorting them with different folders, many of which I didn't need.
But the end result - WORTH EVERY PENNY. See below, I have it appear in my File Explorer just like a partition (the MotherLoad
)
And in it I just have hundreds of albums I ripped or bought or got over the years:
Playlists and shuffles I still do on my PC which I still use for interface. I still don't know if it's possible to add a sound card to it and connect it directly to the amp. So far the need didn't arise.
It's much like a cloud, but the one I'm not letting wonder outside of my apartment.
I didn't try to sync different players, I would probably use multiroom for that. Send the signal to central amp and let it deal with sync.
I hope some of this helped!
Oh, and most of them are sold with no drives. In mine you can use 2,5 and 3,5 HDD and SSD and it is SATA. I popped an empty, formated SSD inside and used it to learn how to operate it. I'll get a few drives next month and move my files to it. You can also use it to back up stuff, just like in a Cloud.
