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Ah, but scope creep :D
First it's storage, then it's storage plus Plex (which is a web server, a medium sized database, a bit of storage, some media indexers, some transcoders), then it's storage plus Plex plus home security cameras (which is a constant media transcoding, a lot of storage management and disks always spinning, and a web server, a small database).
Suddenly your NAS with a small ARM CPU is having to carry the workload of a larger machine.
And this is where in my experience things failed. The gradual scope creep compromised everything, and made my whole setup second rate.
I then purchased an Nvidia Shield https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/ as that could be the Plex Server... and it was much better than the NAS device, and it freed up my NAS to do other things... like falling asleep (damn, spinning disks are noticeable on your electricity bill).
The Nvidia Shield was good for being a Plex server for my film collection (~900 movies), but just couldn't cope with my music collection (~100K tracks) or my photo collection (~200k photos, recent ones very large in size). Which reveals how heavy the database in Plex has to work... if you can give it a better CPU then great, but once collections get large you also need to give it more RAM and storage. Plex on the Nvidia Shield massively outperformed the Synology DS 1817+ for transcoding, this is because it can and did use the hardware transcoding (the NAS never did this, the CPU would run very hot and limited both number of streams and stream quality - and the DS 1817+ is a recent model NAS).
My NAS is unencrypted, uses software RAID (I learned my lesson about relying on hardware RAID controllers), and I could construct it again from any Linux machine (software being universal).
I do strongly recommend something like this if you can... treat your NAS as NAS, it's storage, avoid the scope creep as it ultimately pushes your electricity bill higher and leads you down a quite unsatisfying experience where you're constantly trying to make it better but cannot. This was an expensive lesson to learn... I would have got a cheaper NAS if I'd known in advance it wasn't going to be able to do the things I was going to ask of it - just because you can install software on a NAS does not mean that you should.
For what you've described as your goal I would recommend:
- Get a Synology NAS and a few drives in a JBOD config
- Depending on the security cameras you choose, either run that from the NAS or look at what little additions run the software elsewhere and yet utilise the NAS for storage (i.e. a Ubiquiti Cloud Key as the camera server if you're buying Ubiquiti cameras... or if the NAS supports software for a brand of camera you like, just do that)
- Get an Nvidia Shield for your Plex Server (it will read media from the NAS)... or if you think your collections are large (more than 1K items) get a small fanless media PC with a modern low power (low TDP) x86 CPU as it will enable virtually free hardware transcoding.
- Get a Synology NAS and a few drives in a JBOD config
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Velocio
i can run plex from my PC (assuming I can get networking issues resolved - it never wants to show me the server settings which i gather is a semi-regular issue...) but would rather not run that all day long if I can avoid it. I don't need RAID as I back up my precious stuff (basically just my photos) on the cloud anyway
synology appealed to me because the software gets good reviews and it allows two birds with one stone (streaming + footage storage)
Can I build a cheap x86 PC to use for both? With just windows? No idea about security cam footage software for windows (remote access etc)
re cameras, I like POE because it takes care of connectivity and power at the same time, with a single cable. I can run that through my basement and out through a vent with confidence and it'll be fairly neat too.