Help Android powered NAS

[Joe Healey]

Hi all,

First post on here but I've been lurking in the shadows of guest-hood for a fair while.

I've been doing some reading and in principle I think what I'm about to ask is perfectly doable, but I couldnt really find any threads that went in to as much detail as I would have liked, or that married up quite the combo of factors that I'm imagining...so, to the question at hand...

I would like to set up a NAS/Media server type arrangement on my home network that various devices could stream from (ideally including: Chromecast, various mobile devices, my MacBook, Xbox, desktop Windows PC).

I have a 3TB external HDD which currently harbours a backup of almost all of the media I own, and I have an Asus TF101 lying around spare at the moment. Since it has USB ports on the dock etc, I figured it's probably an ideal candidate for creating a server from.

I'm currently debating installing Ubuntu touch on it (so question 1 is does anyone have any particularly good/bad experiences with this?), partly since I'd like to get a bit more experience with Linux based operating systems. When/if I do that, does anyone know how I'd go about configuring it to turn the HDD into network attached storage (if, indeed, that is possible).


Many thanks

 

[EarlyMon]

My first thought was using Plex, so this might be helpful -

https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201373793-Is-Plex-Media-Server-on-a-NAS-Right-for-Me-

BubbleUPnP is also pretty popular, so -

http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/foru...ble-upnp-server-on-a-wd-mybooklive-nas-within

Both clients are in the Play Store, maybe those pages will give you a starting point.

 

[Joe Healey]

From the sounds of the Plex support pages, the ability to run the server is architecture dependant not just OS dependant? Anyone know any more about that before I ask on the Plex forums?

There's no mention of Tegra there from a quick glance which is what the TF101 is running.

Thanks for the ideas though, I hadn't considered just using a client like Plex on the server.

 

[EarlyMon]

If you don't need to transcode anything your options may open up some.

I've not kept up in this area, searching for either in the Play Store is likely to net you other options as well.

Let us know what you come up with if no one here has the answer.