Best plex nas

General Discussions
1

Hi guys

I need to upgrade my nas because it is simply not powerful enough to transcode my media.

I have a qnap ts453 and was wandering which is the best qnap nas (within £2000) to get that can transcode mkv and m2ts files?

Please help

2

I don’t use qnap but you might want to consider building your own and running FreeNAS or OpenMediaVault on it. It’s easier than you might think. If you’ve ever built a desktop PC, it’s no harder than that.

3

I’d build a simple home PC with an Intel cpu and use it’s hardware acceleration with your current Nas for storage.

4

@Terminator786 - I had a similar situation. My solution was an Intel NUC and so far I’ve been happy with it. Still using my NAS but the Plex duties have been moved from the NAS to the NUC and I’ve been very happy with it so far.

5

I have tried i3, i5 and i7 NUCs (and i3 and i7 PCs’)
Several Synology NAS and Nvidia Shield all as servers!

Transcoding happens (usually) because your client does not like what it is being sent!

From my experience you have 3 options

  1. Get an i7 NAS 0r an i7 box of some description
  2. Encode your media so it plays on almost everything
  3. Get a client that can handle whatever your server sends it!

I am about to move from an i7 NUC (it runs very hot) to a big gnap i7 as my main server so its all in one box.

6

@spikemixture said:

  1. Get a client that can handle whatever your server sends it!

This is far & away the easiest & cheapest option. You never want to transcode anyway not least because it degrades the quality. I have an Odroid C2 running OpenPHT that will Direct Play everything but does not handle HDR so if you need that use either an Nvidia Shield or run MrMC on an Apple TV 4K or Amazon Fire TV 4K.

7

You might want to consider a recent Synology like the DS918+. It has a relatively new Apollo lake-era Celeron (Intel Celeron J3455), it should be up to most of your transcoding needs (if you enable hardware transcoding)