Server Feature Comparisons

[dougw03 16]

Hi,

I am debating between purchasing a new mac mini, an Intel NUC running Windows, and/or buying a high-end NAS for running my emby media server. I searched around but could not find any feature comparisons amongst Emby Server running on different OS's. Does a knowledgebase article exist with a table that outlines which features are available versus OS version? Thanks

[neik 873]

Please correct me if I'm wrong but afaik the server features are independent from the OS.

[Luke 42085]

That is correct 

[Aevaris 8]

While I'm new to the Emby community, I have a lot of Plex experience so expect it to be relatively similar in this capacity. In terms of Emby features for Emby server, I would also expect the feature set to be mostly independent of OS and more come down to the hardware within the box. TL;DR: If you already have a storage solution that you're happy with, don't need any features a high end NAS would provide, I would go with which fits your interests better between the NUC and the MacMini. I would go with the NUC because I don't use Apple products. More details and my experience below...

I suspect the main question to answer what platform to go with are:

• What is your budget?
  • If you're going for lowest cost as a primary motivator, then go with that.
• What are your interests?
  • Do you want to learn something new / do you want to see what new options a NAS / NUC / MacMini will bring you?
• What are your needs?
  • Will this new device service other needs of yours?
    • e.g. Do you need/want a different place to store your media as well as your media server?

A year or two back, I needed to replace an ailing mini-NAS and replaced it with a 6 drive Synology NAS. My reasons for doing this were:

1. I needed a redundant storage for my media, my documents, my photos, etc. I wanted to be able to RAID my storage with 2 disk redundancy as the odds of losing more than 2 of 6 drives without a catastrophic loss (fire, theft, etc) is low.
2. I wanted to learn to virtualize servers. To do this, I wanted somewhere to store my vdisks that was safe (see #1) and flexible.
3. I wanted to be able to compartmentalize my applications from my storage (e.g. I can make my Emby VM read-only to my NAS so in the case of security breach, no one can do anything to my NAS.)
4. I wanted to explore what new opportunities a high end NAS would offer me that I didn't even know existed.

For these reasons, a high end NAS made sense for me as my path. One thing I will note, my NAS does not host my media server. NAS' are designed to be storage devices (and high end ones are storage devices++). As a result, they are not made with CPUs like servers/desktops are. Depending on your usage of your media server, I would advice against using a NAS as the media server host due to the CPU usage of transcoding. It can work and people definitely do it successfully, but I personally didn't like the idea of competing resources and it didnt meant my need for compartmentalization (#3).