HDMI OR eSata port on my NAS

[john32073]

I am looking at two NAS Servers.
The QNAP TS 251+ It Has the HDMI port and upgradable memory plus a lot of features. I was fixing to buy it when I ran upon the new
Synology DS218+ The + one has an eSATA port where as the DS218 doesn't. I really like the esata port but it has not got HDMI I really like the whole setup on the DS218+ upgradeable memory too
What advantage is having an HDMI over not having it?
I know I will use esata a whole lot
This unit will be used mainly as my cloud storage for my family and it will not be accessed 90 percent of the time just when storing stuff and pulling stuff
I will be using Plex server as time go forward for streaming stuff off amazon and nextflix
This will be my First NAS Server
I have a fault of always Over doing things, I feel as I might be doing that now making this more completed than it need to be
Would HDMI be necessary?

 

[USAFRet]

HDMI and eSATA are for two completely different uses.

eSATA would be for connecting an external drive.
HDMI would be for displaying the video out to a monitor or TV.

 

[Scottray]

The QNAP is set up so that you can integrated in with your entertainment center and play videos directly to your TV (connected via an HDMI cable). With the Synology, you would stream video to a Smart TV via hardwired ethernet connection of wifi. With the QNAP, if you run out of drive space, you need to replace the drives. While the Synology has the esata port,so you can add an additional external drive bay.

 

[john32073]

Scottray, If I understand you correctly Video and TV streaming with Synology will be streamed to the tv thru my Hardwired ethernet cable wired to the TV. whereas QNAP it will connect thru HDMi straight from NAS or the same as Synology nas if I chose. Synology the eSata I would use more Transfering external hard drive Data from all my backup stuff
HDMI I wouldn't use much right now Thanks for the input

 

[jsmithepa]

IMHO, let a NAS be a NAS, vendors throw these other extra stuff to it, honestly I dunno how many ppl use them that way.

Playing Video - let your PCs do it, where you can load whatever codec and the front end (interface) your heart's desires. Leave the NAS alone do the one job it's principally tasked to do.

eSata - Me, if am afraid to run out of room, get a NAS box with extra bays, so if u need more room in the future, just fill the empty bays out. They way storage$ keep going down though, most likely you just swap the drive and obsolete the old one.

I like my NAS to have:

Extra drive bays.
Removable bays, so adding/removing drives is like popping in an 8-Track (before ur time?)
Dual Ethernet would be nice, can potentially double bandwidth.
Built-in utility to duplicate a drive, to help during swapping, without any PC intervention.

For your particular situation, able to sleep the drives when idling, go into a low power state.

Lots of NAS come with some RAID facility, that's up to you whether something u use.

Budget a UPS for it.