This is a helpful list. Interesting to know that the paid plex pass enables more capabilities. What I’m curious about is these can all work as a server for ST.
In what way specifically? How do you envision a home server being integrated with SmartThings? 
I’ve had a QNAP TS-251 for about 5 years. I’ve been using CrashPlan as my cloud backup for a bit longer than that, and picked the QNAP because it could run the backup software natively. It took some effort to figure out that the stock 2GB of memory couldn’t manage the backup routine, but once I upgraded it to 8gb it ran pretty smoothly and with minimal intervention from me. I use it primarily for photos (daily sync with OneDrive, and our phones sync all photos up to OneDrive), MP3 storage (hardly ever streamed these days), general document storage, and backup.
That being said, I should also note that it just died (or really, died a couple of months ago and I just finally dug into what happened, since nothing on it was immediately critical for me). I had assumed one of the memory sticks had gone bad, as happened to me a couple of years ago, but it looks like it’s something on the chip / mainboard. I’m packing it up to have QNAP repair it because it’s about half the price of replacing with a current model and I don’t have much need for any additional features, although the latest models use ~30% less power according to official specs. So, I can’t endorse it for the lifespan, but then again 5 years seems like it’s at the upper end for a lot of consumer tech anyway.
Potentially to run custom apps via API (I don’t know how to do this), but hoping that at some point some apps are available that can run in parallel to ST- to do energy logging for instance) and/or other customizations not available in the stock ST.
1 Like
one other option on your current pc is to select the energy efficient profile. May help more on newer PCs though.
Understood. In that case, whether or not you can run custom-written apps that utilize the ST API, will depend on how those apps are written. If they are compiled x86 executables, then they will need to run on an x86 computer. If, however, they are NodeJS apps, then they should run anywhere, assuming a compatible version of NodeJS is available on the platform you choose. So, it is really hard to say whether or not a NAS device will be able to run the custom ST apps you’d like in the future, without more details regarding those apps. 
1 Like