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Cheers, as always you seem to know what I need more than I do!
I suspect I shall do this in stages, so will spec the NAS box first, then move onto a plex box, I have a few old machines floating round the office so might be able to use one of those...
looking at the QNAP stuff, would one of these do the trick or would you recommend a higher spec version?
Sam_w-
That is pretty much perfect for your usage.
As for disks... go for size now, don't buy all of the disks from the same manufacturer and from the same batch. i.e. if you really insist on buy all Seagate or Western Digital drives... order 2 from one supplier, 1 from another, 1 from another.
Disks made at the same time, and with the same spec, tend to fail at the same time. RAID5 will give you protection against a single disk failure, but don't push your luck by buying identical disks from the same production batch that will likely fail at the same time. Just mix it up, so long as the capacity is the same there is nothing stopping you mixing producers either... feel free to mix Samsung with Seagate, etc.
Velocio
I run a Plex server.
And I run a NAS.
I would definitely recommend making this distinct things, and not the same box.
The NAS should do nothing other than manage a number of drives, ensure that there is enough parity (data duplicated in case a disk fails), and keep the data on the drives available to the network.
From a NAS with a small number of drives (4 or fewer) look for hardware RAID5. This allows for 1 disk to fail in it's entirety and your data is still going to be OK. It's also very fast for reading data, which is good for media. Of course, if a drive can fail and you still have data this means that you don't get full capacity... if you put 4 x 3TB drives in there for 12TB total, only 3 x 3TB are actually usable... so you'll have 9TB of space.
If you go for a NAS with more than 4 disks, then start looking at RAID6. This allows for 2 drives to fail without causing data loss. It gets expensive at this point.
Off the shelf NAS is decent enough, QNAP do some nice gear. It is possible to beat the price by about a 3rd... not off the disks, but of the enclosure and software. Look at FreeNAS and google some guides. In real terms it means you can save £100 or so, but will invest a lot of time and energy to do so.
As for the Plex media server. There are things it needs, and things it doesn't need. It does need a good CPU as it will be encoding quite a bit so that media suits various screen sizes or bandwidth requirements. It will need a few GB of RAM as it runs a database... but if you have a NAS then the whole of the Plex server can just be run on a single small SSD with Windows, in a small media PC.
Spec CPU high, spec RAM medium, spec disk low.