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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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If you have a desktop, throw a hard drive or two in it and you have a NAS. Software (like you mentioned Plex or Jellyfin) does the rest. Even if you only have a laptop, a hard drive in a standard USB enclosure will perform this role just fine.
Thank you, but I don't want to keep my desktop running. The cooling noise, the electricity. Did I mentioned the fans? They are quiet but I can hear them, I want something that goes silent and wakes up when needed.
There are some passively cooled (i.e. no spinning fan) SFF Desktops (HP, DELL, etc.) or you could get a Raspberry Pi 5 and stick it into a Geekworm case. Power consumption with these devices should hover around 5W, maybe slightly higher under load. The Desktops most probably support WoL. The Raspberry Pi doesn’t.
Also in my experience the raspberry pi isn't all that great for a NAS considering you are reliant on using USB hard drives and also need a separate powered USB hub for them
Which Pi did you try? Since the Pi4/CM4 (can even work with SAS drives) and especially with the Pi5 you can build some nicely performing NASes.
I think I used a Pi 4B, either the 8 or 2 GiB model because that's what I had lying around.
I never tried a compute module but instead upgraded to a lenovo tiny pc.
A note on the fans specifically, you can buy quiet fans. In general, the larger the fan, the lower the speed you can run it and the quieter it is. You can also setup fan curves so they are only doing anything of note when the computer is pumping out heat (given your statements, that would be basically never).
The electricity usage is a pretty notable thing. Though, if you take the graphics card out of a desktop (use integrated graphics, a dedicated graphics card in a server is just wasted electricity) and set the OS to power saver (this mostly means it won't boost the CPU to higher clocks), it really won't use much power. Compared to buying dedicated NAS hardware, you may never recoup the energy costs between the hardware you have and the lower-power hardware you need to buy.
If you don't already own one, a Kill-A-Watt is a great tool to have. Tells you how much energy a device is using. Biggest thing I found was my TV had a vampire draw of 15W. Literally draws 15W while off. This got the TV put on a power strip I turn off when I'm not using it.
Now, with all that said, sometimes you just want what you want. And there is nothing wrong with that. My goal here is to make sure you don't feel you have to pick one option over the other.
Damn 15w is huge! What's the brand? Does it have smart (WiFi) power on? Does it help if you switch it off?
It's a very old 1080p Sharp TV. I know it does have WiFi which I have not setup, but that certainly doesn't mean the WiFi is off.
I'll have to see if there is some way to disable the WiFi completely and re-measure it.