Need help in choosing a Home Media Server

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I don't really have any space related limitations, my main focus is on a price-to-performance build that handles my minimum requirements. Is there a reason why you went with N5105 instead of N100 which I've seen many people recommend for a mini-pc? Do you think you could let me know what kind of external bays you used and also what kind of multi-drive bay you are looking into? I've seen stuff like TerraMaster and Orico but not sure how would you determine which one you should get.

Preferably, I would like to not have a single transcoding stream but the capability of transcoding would be a plus.

I have a 5-bay TerraMaster (the USB 3.0 version). This one is an upgrade: https://www.terra-master.com/us/products...5-300.html. They also have a few other upgrades in the D5 USB Gen 3.2 (which is what my previous post should say instead of 3.1) that are decently priced.

I have no complaints about performance other than total throughput -- I would use them as storage drives ONLY and never use them for high I/O operations or where speed is necessary. It would work just fine for storing media, as the throughput wouldn't be high enough in nearly any case to cause issues. I stupidly used one of the drives for part of my pipeline that sapped every available bit of bandwidth and it slowed everything down by a factor of ten or more. This is not unique to this model, total throughput on a DAS should be considered when planning drive locations and you shouldn't be stupid like I was.