Looking for some advice. Currently running my PMS on my iMac (4.2 ghz i7 w/ 32 gigs of ram) with a USB 3 attached WD 8TB hard drive. I’ve been toying with getting a NAS for backup of all the Macs in my house. Originally was looking at a 2 bay config in a RAID 1 config. since the 6TB drive is close to its limit thought about looking at the DS918+ 2 10TB in a RAID 1 config for Plex and 2 4TB drives in RAID 1 for Mac backup. Any downsides to moving the PMS off the iMac to the NAS?
Usual use of the PMS. Family Room nVidia Shield streaming 4k and either a remote user or an AppleTV playing in one of the bedrooms.
You can minimize the impact of your transition by starting with using the NAS as external storage for your existing PMS on the iMac. This way you’re not losing anything from your current setup / performance.
You can then create a Plex Media Server on the NAS to verify it works ok for you. NAS tend to have limitations compared to a dedicated server, e.g. when it comes to transcoding. According to Plex’ compatibility guide, the 918+ should do ok transcoding 1080p content using HW transcoding (SD also w/ software-only transcoding) – it might not do so for 4K content (h264 only, otherwise only decoding).
If you’re happy with its performance, your an do a full migration of your existing iMac PMS to the NAS
