I have an old ReadyNAS Duo that has to be replaced and am looking for suggestions for the best replacement NAS. I looked at the Nvidia Shield but the storage is too little (500GB); I have right now about 1.6TB of videos. I’m looking at either a ReadyNAS or a WD NAS that has Plex Media Server installed, but am open to other suggestions…What do people think the best NAS is that has Plex preinstalled?
I could recommend Qnap NAS, they all have a very nice Plex integration (but unfortunately no support for hardware accelerated transcoding through Plex yet). The required model depends on your preferences and usage. There is an overview for NAS and Plex:
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201373803
Right now, I have to make the very same decision. I have a lot of friends accessing my PMS, so I expect 2 or maybe 3 concurrent transcoding processes to happen sometimes. I also have a 6 TB movie library right now, so I need at least a 4-bay NAS with RAID 5. That’s why I tend to buy the Qnap TVS-471. For lower requirements (one or no transcoding process) the TS-451(+) should be fine.
Transcoding is the bane of any consumer off-the-shelf NAS solution. If you expect to make use of transcoding (hard to avoid… it’s an intrinsic feature of Plex), you either run PMS on a separate box than the NAS, or build your own NAS with enough horsepower (what I did). Otherwise you can spend a massive amount of effort to maybe reduce transcoding in the majority (but not all) situations by trying to be OCD about file formats, codecs, and client/link control (since a network link slower than the effective bitrate of the file will require transcoding regardless of codecs/clients)
