Well passwordless.

Same thing in this context. But sure, an encrypted partition would work.

Dunno about ideal, but it should work.

It does have quite a bit of overhead, meaning it’s not the fastest out there, but as long as it’s fast enough to serve the media you need, that shouldn’t matter.

Also, you need to either mount it manually on the command line whenever you need it or be comfortable with leaving your SSH private key in your media server unencrypted. Since you are already concerned with needing to encrypt file share access even in the local network, the latter might not be a good option to you.

The good part about it is, as long as you can ssh from your media server to your NAS, this should just work with no additional setup needed.

Interesting. Though it does seem to to require your private key to be unencrypted…

Is sshfs an option? Unfortunately, I don’t think you can put that into /etc/fstab, though…