Recently upgraded the i5 Mac mini I'd been using as a music & photo server to an M1 model. One of the things I lost was hard drive space -- went from 2TB to 256GB on the new model (great price on it, couldn't pass up the deal). Right now I have an SSD plugged into a Thunderbolt port that holds our (ever-growing) Apple Music library and our photo library, which I'm going to transition to Mylio instead of keeping everything in iCloud. I've seen info that both of those apps function best with direct attached storage, which is why I'm using that SSD.
I also have a QNAP NAS that I use for Plex. Someone mentioned that I could use LUN+iSCSI to dedicate a storage pool on the NAS to show up as a local drive on the Mini, so that way I could store those libraries on the QNAP instead of a USB drive. The idea of consolidating all my media is very appealing, especially for the RAID 5 protection and the ability to easily backup the whole NAS in one shot. Is anyone else using a similar setup for music or photos? I'd want to make sure it's dead simple to maintain and won't flake out on me or require constant management. My wife is the one who takes care of adding to those libraries and for the sake of her sanity (and our marriage) I don't want to have the mounted drives suddenly disappear or require re-mounting on a regular basis especially if I'm not around to troubleshoot.
I also have a QNAP NAS that I use for Plex. Someone mentioned that I could use LUN+iSCSI to dedicate a storage pool on the NAS to show up as a local drive on the Mini, so that way I could store those libraries on the QNAP instead of a USB drive. The idea of consolidating all my media is very appealing, especially for the RAID 5 protection and the ability to easily backup the whole NAS in one shot. Is anyone else using a similar setup for music or photos? I'd want to make sure it's dead simple to maintain and won't flake out on me or require constant management. My wife is the one who takes care of adding to those libraries and for the sake of her sanity (and our marriage) I don't want to have the mounted drives suddenly disappear or require re-mounting on a regular basis especially if I'm not around to troubleshoot.