I occasionally do some paid editing work in my home suite. I use a MBP and I just use whatever storage I have left on external drives or buy new ones as the project budget permits. Most of the time, my work is done on-site using a production company's facilities so it's not a big time operation here at home.
I also like to download and watch video over my wifi to to TV or my phone in other rooms of the house (don't typically move the laptop much). I tend to use the laptop's internal drive for that.
I'm beginning to outgrow my storage for both purposes, but only just. I could continue as I am for quite some time, deleting media at home after I watch it, and buying physically fairly small drives to put away in cupboards for work. However, I'm thinking I could fix both storage needs for a very long time by spending a bit bigger (but not MUCH), and getting a proper RAID. My mind immediately went to NAS, but it occurs to me that, that mightn't necessarily be the most cost effective or efficient way to go given the limited scope of my needs.
My home network is very slow consumer equipment, and I have no ethernet infrastructure at all. I thought I could maybe just hook the NAS up to the laptop via ethernet but then at that point, isn't that just DAS with the extra complications of networking? Would I need a switch between the 2? My home streaming is just done over wifi, since everything is compressed media anyway.
If I buy a decent thunderbolt DAS RAID and expose it to the wifi network via the laptop, would the costs stack up in terms of power consumption and wear and tear of the expensive lappy (given it'd be powered on nearly constantly)? Are there NAS devices that I can directly attach to the lappy for editing, but leave on and connected to wifi for home streaming? Would it need any additional networking equipment in that use case? Can I run jellyfin on it? I feel like a NAS doesn't make sense but would like help puzzling this out.
The point of NAS is to be able to access it from multiple places and/or multiple devices without having to move the actual storage. If you are doing neither of those things then you probably don't need NAS. Another point is having scalable storage which might be the biggest pain when talking about a laptop, any laptop. A hub and multiple external enclosures can get you pretty far though.
It sounds like you use your own storage when you can't use the customer's.
If you're only sometimes need to do things at home and elsewhere with hot own storage, it's not really worth the hassle. However, if you'd like to start doing more stuff with your own storage while on the go, then NAS could be worth it.
How much data are we currently talking about here?
That's what I was thinking. My biggest home project are only a 1-2 TB max, and most are more in the order of 200-400GB. The type of DAS options I'm thinking of would be RAID systems. I'm fond of the LaCie ones just because of familiarity and relative reliability, but I do think they're overpriced and they went through a period a few years ago, of a pretty major quality dip. I haven't dealt with them much since but I think they seemed to have pulled themselves back up from that.
It's not a major concern that I'd spend a lot of money on, but the idea of self-hosting a little mini home netflix seems fun and I guess for that I'd want things to be always on. Ideally there'd be one piece of hardware for each purpose given it's a little unprofessional to host my home viewing content on the same storage as professional media, and I guess if the drives are always spinning then they'd wear faster just so they can be ready at a moment's notice for me to watch TV but I don't really have the space or money to buy dedicated equipment for each so I'm hoping to dual purpose here. There's always the option to buy a cheap 'passport' drive that's always connected to the laptop as the 'media server' for my jellyfin content and have the laptop be running the jellyfin server as it is now, it's just, I guess I wondered if that made less sense because I'll need more editing storage eventually anyway, and maybe running my very expensive laptop 24/7 would cost more in the long run than running a NAS.