So, I was excited to be finally moving to a NAS in December and had my sights set on the Synology DS920+ until I found out a 923+ had just been released. I figured I’d go for the upgrade but it wasn’t available where I live until a couple of weeks ago.
Thankfully when I went to order online it was out of stock and I took time to read the specs and realized that the new one doesn’t have hardware acceleration. For the past two days I’ve been trying to decide whether to stick to a Synology NAS or move to something else, but the reason I wanted a NAS in the first place was for everything it can do and I’m sold on DSM. Having Plex and hardware acceleration was just the icing on the cake.
My last bit of hope was that I could eventually add an external GPU to the 923+ but looking at the supported NAS page I found that it doesn’t support that either.
As it is, I think I’m leaning towards getting the 920+ despite liking some things the 923+ has. Most of my library is in HEVC with a significant number of items in HEVC 2160p HDR with Dolby Atmos audio or some such so I can’t see any hope in the 923+. Converting nearly my entire library to H264 before the move will also be cumbersome.
They say an expert is someone called in to share the blame so I guess I want to hear the opinions of those running either/both of these devices and any advice before moving ahead.
The chart shows video capability but does nothing to address what happens when the audio is also transcoded. If all your clients are Nvidia Shields then you probably would be ok but adding Dolby Atomos along with HDR will strain the CPU in that NAS.
If you really want the a do it all setup you would run Plex on a NUC with an i5/i7 and use the NAS for media storage.
So I left one bit out. All my Atmos audio files have at least one other audio channel
I just did a bit of reading and the NUC setup seems like it could work with the 923+ where I use the NAS for other stuff and the NUC for Plex. But that seems a little extreme. I guess because I looked at the SimplyNUC extreme version. My search was for running Plex on a NUC. Downside is this adds an unplanned grand to my expenditure so I’ll consider it for an upgrade option down the line but will start with just the NAS.
So given your input here (thanks for it by the way) I have picked the 920+ as the lesser NAS to use as a file server. I will not get a separate machine for the server just yet so I’ll start with the 920+ and for a time run Plex on it and then at a later time (or when the 920+ seems inadequate), I’ll then get a NUC. Preferably one of the ridiculously powered SimplyNUC devices I saw that comes with a tuner and I can finally use the DVR feature (especially nice since I’ll have oodles of space.
I’m comfortable with running both Windows and Linux (current server is on Ubuntu) so either option is fine for me.
Regarding the external GPU attached to the Synology, I was just exploring options about expansion. For instance, the 923+ comes with 1Gbit ethernet but can have an expansion card that makes it work with 10Git. This seems nice but in my area we are far from it. I have a 1Gbit connection and that’s by far the fastest and no other provider comes close. My provider isn’t talking about increasing speed but instead coverage so although I would want to future proof my purchase, connection speed isn’t a priority right now. I had read somewhere that some other NAS devices (I think QNap could have been one of them) had thunderbolt 3/4 ports so could support external GPUs and hoped the newer Synologies could do that as well. So for now, 920+ will have to do then a NUC in the near future should this prove to be inadequate given my library is mostly HEVC and my family have devices that usually require some transcoding most of the time.
