Quoted from Luckydogg420:Oh man, I was thinking about a personal cloud, or media server, or redundant backup drives, but I have no idea where to start. I've considered buying a $300 pre configured NAS, but dont even k ow enough about the topic to know if it's a good deal or device or solution.
I just with there was something plug and play that it's easy to add drives to in the future, and easy to connect to with all of the families devices.
Is it wise to run a media server as a NAS backup? Or should those be two separate devices?
For $300 your options will be a bit limited. At that price for minimum configuration required I would check out the Western Digital My Cloud Series. The 4TB version below is just over $300.
https://www.amazon.com/Cloud-Ultra-Network-Attached-Storage/dp/B01AWH04EW/ref=sr_1_6
If you want to have a prebuilt NAS that can transcode media files, especially HD / 4K media files using Plex, then a more powerful solution is needed. The Western Digital My Cloud Pro series is a good option. The pro series is more expensive than the solution above (drives not included either) but it's also far more powerful, supports transcoding and allows for a great number of RAID configurations. If you don't need to transcode videos to stream to devices the regular My Cloud option above is great for pictures, documents, music, etc.
https://www.amazon.com/Diskless-Cloud-Pro-Network-Attached-Storage/dp/B01GLRX6C4/ref=sr_1_7