Trust me, it happens to a lot of people that way, and while my story was slightly different, it still ended up the same way - wanting large storage and enough power to do whatever I wanted with Plex and not worry about it. And for the same price you can just run a server, right? Eventually you will upgrade to a server, and soon you will be looking at just having enough storage to not worry about it for a while, so you start shopping for a big case with room for a dozen or more drives. But a good NAS with power to transcode 3 or 4 streams at the same time will cost you $800-1200 plus the cost of the drives, of which you need several 8 or 10tb drives now because your collection is growing. But then you will have a lot of media and start thinking that if your friends were using it, it would justify all that time spent on ripping and all that money spent on storage, but your Shield can't do more than a few streams direct or one or two transcodes, so you want to graduate to either a powerful NAS or a server to do it.
At some point you will figure that it is cheaper to spend more now to get more storage, so maybe you will get a 3 or 5 drive NAS and spend some bucks on some drives. Soon you will have 200 movies and even with compression you will run out of space. Here's the problem though - if you take the time to rip 80 movies, you will soon find you want to add more media to your Plex. A 6 or 8 tb NAS will only cost 2-3 hundred and it is so nice having some network storage, not only for your media, but for anything else you might want to share across devices. Storage is pretty cheap these days, and if you are going to only store a hundred or so movies AND you plan to spend the time to compress them, you don't need much. You can also share the storage from a PC, but if you don't have a PC that can run all the time (doesn't have to be a server, just any PC), then it is troublesome. I believe you can also plug many external drives into the Shield and use the storage that way, but this would require you unplugging it and plugging it back into your macbook to add more content.
Many home wifi/firewall units have a USB where you can plug in a drive and turn it into a NAS. Your best bet is to pick up a NAS unit of some kind, but there are some other options.
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