Hi all,

I am interested in building a plex set-up and could use some advice as I'm not the most networking savvy person. I feel like I'm getting whip lash from everything I read, one website says get a NAS, the next will say to get a mini-pc and DAS, another says no actually get a mini-pc and and a NAS.

I recently did a project to digitize my parents old home videos and ripped all their dvds. I'm currently scanning all their old photos. I'm guessing this will be slightly above 5 TB when finished. I will likely add more blu-rays to the collection over time slowly when things are purchased, etc, but have no interest in torrenting and vastly increasing my library.

I will likely only have 1 stream at a time but could theoretically have up to 4. As mentioned, most of the material are plain DVDs but there will be some BluRays, maybe a small handful of 4k dvds.

I was looking at the standard synology nas' but then got nervous because it looks like they all lack a lot of transcoding ability? Should I get a simple NAS and then a mac mini to deal with the processing? I was thinking probably 12 TB (4 bays of 3 TB drives). Size is a hardware consideration for me as I live in a small 1 bedroom apt and don't have a ton of space. What raid is recommended? I will prob use this as a laptop backup as well since I have the hard drive space.

Any advice is greatly appreciated, I have severe analysis paralysis on this one. Also if anyone has a user guide for dummies for this kind of thing it will be greatly appreciated.