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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I mean, it's "user friendly" in the sense that it's the easiest solution, but it still requires understanding how servers work, knowing how to administer a RAID, knowing what kind of transcoding settings to set etc.

Also, I think anyone that tells you that you can just have always-online media that you don't have to babysit is lying. As far as I can tell, that doesn't exist. Your server will break at some point, for no apparent reason, and you're going to have to fix it. Usually the fixes are easy on their own, but you end up accidentally nuking the RAID and losing all your rips. It's hardly "user friendly".

This isn't crapping on Plex, it's sort of the nature of the beast

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There are NAS devices from a bunch of manufacturers where you can just buy them, plug them in, run through the setup wizard, and click install on the Plex app in their built in App Store. Not much more difficult than getting printer drivers installed.

That’s certainly more than many people are able (or willing) to put up with, and it requires a several hundred dollar investment. But NAS ease of use for common tasks is pretty good theee days.

The problem is that if you don't understand the basic concepts around how NAS works, you can still get yourself into trouble even with a setup wizard. Hang out in any NAS forum and you'll come across regular posts from people looking for help because they chose a form of striping ("because that option gave the most disk space, and no, I didn't see the popup warning about data loss") and then asks for help recovering data after a hard drive failure: "I bought a replacement drive, how do I get my old data copied to it?"

> Not much more difficult than getting printer drivers installed.

Dude, really bad example, printers are hell to set up.

These days pretty much every printer should support IPP. You just plug it in and it shows up to devices on your network.

Plugged it into Ethernet logged into web based config set password. Installed distro package for HP printers instantly usable on void linux and Windows.

I think 99% of problems are wifi related or trying to share the USB connected printer over the network.

You don't need a RAID. Just have 2 hard drives and copy stuff from one folder to another. Click skip all for identical files that already exist.

I've had jellyfin serving my music, family videos and youtube rips (e.g. university lectures) for years. Haven't had to touch it since I set it up. I just plop files into folders and it picks them up.

I got a lot of family videos from my mom, who keeps them on her computer plus an external hard drive, which she brought to me to copy. Copying files to USB drives as a backup and sharing that is pretty understandable for non tech people.

If you don't have raid you at least should have some application-level checksums - ideally error correction codes.

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