Budget home streaming NAS?

I currently have a very old synology ds115j NAS which connects via a switch to my Intel NUC just to stream movies and the like, I dont use it for photo backups or time machine backups as I’m happy paying for larger icloud storage and have important folder that get backed up. I dont need to remotely access it (away from home) and can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve done that. I’m happy either using my macbook or the NAS to download items so doesn’t need to have that functionality. It’s connected to a VPN and needs to continue to be able to.

It has a 1TB WD SATA drive in it which diskstation tells me is healthy and is 72% full, I fairly regularly delete stuff that I’ve just watched once so it isn’t bogged down with rubbish.

The NAS is sooooooooooooooooo slow, like painfully slow. So slow I avoid using it because I want to be able to click something and things happen and not feel like it’s about to completely breakdown. I dont need 2 drives so that one drive is backed up by another, if it were to break it would be annoying but not catastrophic, it’s nothing I can’t replace.

Budget? Well secondhand would be fine, probably no more than £200 for the NAS itself and then I can get maybe a SSD separately to go inside it.

try the newer version of what you have either the 119 or 120.

running SSD’ in NAS’ have other challenges, but if its not backups that should be a problem

Slow at what?

I have a ds215j, which is the 2 disc version of yours, and while it takes a minute or so to wake up, it’s absolutely fine for streaming videos and music.

It’s totally fine for streaming and plays fine but when you’re using the network portal it’s painfully slow to do anything like access your nfs settings etc.

Cheapest budget option is to use a Raspberry Pi and run something like Open Media Vault, then just plug in a decent sized external USB hard drive to use as storage.

If it’s just a source for streaming, why bother with a NAS at all?  Get a USB hard disk and bang it onto the NUC along with Plex.

Quite a few wireless routers support streaming from a usb drive plugged into it. I’ve not tried it myself but could work if that’s all you want it for?

Becuase I dont fancy having to dig in the TV unit everytime I want to put something new on it, I want to be able to connect to it from my macbook.

Becuase I dont fancy having to dig in the TV unit everytime I want to put something new on it, I want to be able to connect to it from my macbook.

that should be easy enough if you use an external drive on your NUC, as per Cougar’s idea. You just need to set it up as a network share (SMB probably easiest). Is the NUC linux or windows?

i have the 215j and it did get painfully slow so i replaced the hdd with an ssd and use that solely for the o/s (and keep the packages and services to a minimum) – then i have a 4tb external hdd plugged in via usb for vids and photos etc and it works perfectly

Libreelec is installed on the NUC.

never used it but a quick google suggests there’s a “share external drives” feature which will share all attached USB drives as SMB network shares, which you’ll be able to access via Finder on your Mac using ⌘K.