321
Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy
(www.howtogeek.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
321 points (97.3% liked)
Technology
77090 readers
3566 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
For backups it will be fine. Same for media storage. But if you want media streaming from the device (like plex) then you'll want something better.
Yeah, I guess I should have been clear that's part of what I was thinking (although to be honest I'm mostly a schmuck who pays for a few streaming services and uses that)
What exactly would be the main choking point? Horsepower of the Pi to take that stored file and stream it to the client?
So I believe the Pi 4 was the 1st to have an actual ethernet controller and not just having essentially a built in USB to ethernet adapter so bandwidth to your HDDs/ethernet shouldn't be a problem.
Streaming directly off of the pi should be tolerable. A bit slower than a full fat computer with tons of ram for caching and CPU power to buffer things. But fine. There's some quirks with usb connected HDDs that makes them a bit slower than they should (still in 2025 UASP isn't a given somehow) But streaming ultimately doesn't need that much bandwidth.
What's going to be unbearable is transcoding. If you're connecting some shitty ass smart TV that only understands like H264 and your videos are 265 then that has to get converted, and that SUCKS. Plex by default also likes to play videos at a lower bitrate sometimes, which means transcoding.
There's also other weird quirks to look out for. Like someone else was (I think) doing exactly what you wanted to do, but no matter what the experience was unbearable. Apparently LVM was somehow too much compute for the pi to handle, and as soon as they switched to raw EXT4 they could stream perfectly fine. I don't remember why this was a problem, but it's just kind of a reminder of how weak these devices actually are compared to "full" computers.