[H-GEN] Home NAS box and video streaming: how to choose a processor?

[Daniel Devine]

Not really related to your situation but I picked up a Netgear RND2000
NAS on the weekend plus two 1.5TB drives. It has great features such
as bittorrent, multiple streaming protocols, multiple file sharing
protocols, runs Linux and has official and community addons and only
cost me $380 from Umart. I believe it runs an x86 processor (a little
strange) and apparently sucks somewhere between 15 and 25 watts. Of
course this would not transcode video well.

But if power efficiency, reliability and simplicity at a fairly
affordable price are the most important factors then I definitely
recommend this NAS.

I think once you start requiring video conversion from your NAS then
obviously power efficiency goes out the window. Maybe in the future
when you can get a NAS with an ARM Cortex A15 style processor then you
could start to expect video processing from a low power device.

A possible solution is to have a BIOS wake-up and a cron job set up on
a beefy desktop to do video conversion early every morning.

--Daniel Devine