NAS or Mac mini for home streaming?

[izzy0242mr]

I'd like to have a setup where I can stream movies/videos that I own from a home server to my TV (or over the internet, too, if I'm traveling, which would be cool), but I am concerned about electricity usage (for a variety of reasons) and want to use something that's low-power as much as possible.

I am not sure if a Mac Mini would be good for something like this (I know some use them as NAS systems)? I have an old 2010 Mac mini server (2.66 Intel Core 2 Duo, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB of HDD storage), but am not sure if that would work (a) well enough or (b) will be power efficient even if I upgrade it to SSDs, as it's an Intel chip.

I know the M1 Mac minis run pretty low-power which is nice, but I'm also wanting to stay on a lower budget for something like this (under $250) and M1 Macs haven't dropped that low yet.

Would any kind of Mac mini be viable for this? I'm not sure what sort of energy loads they tend to have when streaming media like what I'm planning. Or would a dedicated low-power NAC be more reasonable?

 

[venom600]

The Mac Mini is great for that kind of usage, especially if you aren’t transcoding. Are you using Plex or something else?

 

[izzy0242mr]

The Mac Mini is great for that kind of usage, especially if you aren’t transcoding. Are you using Plex or something else?

Would probably be using Plex, unless there's something better.

I know there's a lot of variation across the Mac Mini product line though. The M1 Mini can idle at 6.8 W but max is 39 W; the 2014 Mini can idle even lower at 6 W but has a higher peak of 85 W. And my C2D mini idles at 11 W and peaks at 85 W. https://support.apple.com/en-us/103253

I'm not sure how much power Plex uses and whether it would make sense to find a 2014 or even an M1 Mac mini for the lower power usage, or if all 3 systems will use a comparable amount of low power for the same task (running Plex).

 

[salamanderjuice]

The problem with Mac Minis for this use case is storage. 2018+ models are stuck with what the factory gave them and so you're stuck with a spaghetti of externals. There's no real benefit to Mac OS for this use case either.

A NAS or mini PC with an Intel N100 will draw less power too, granted they are slower but they are cheap and typically support multiple internal swappable drives.

Another option is a raspberry pi but you have to go the external drive route again.

And lookup Jellyfin as an alternative to plex.