I know this isn’t quite the right place… But does anyone have any suggestions for a NAS to run PLEX and typical home usage and storage? I’m looking for something purchased under $500. Thank you!
Synology have a range from 2 discs to 8 or more but not all will serve Plex!
Just depends on your dollars and how many it may be streaming too.
Plex on Synology NAS (DS1511+ for me) works perfectly.
Asustor units tend to be a bit cheaper than Synology and can run Plex well. They may fit within your range better depending on if you need to buy drives within that $500 budget.
How much storage, and how much transcoding? Most off-the-shelf NAS appliances can’t handle much if any transcoding requiring either OCD control over your clients and the network connection between them, as well as pre-transcoding all your media… or you build a custom NAS+PMS box (what I did). Staying within your price range with sufficient transcoding power will be difficult.
It probably makes best sense to look at the NAS compatibility list. Please remember to take the processor and memory into consideration when balancing against cost and where you see yourself in a couple years. Had I known I would be at this level, I’d have gone bigger. 
In all fairness, the NAS I have now is no slouch (DS1815+) but it can’t transcode video for S*** .
I can tell you, when you prepare your media correctly for whatever your target streaming device(s) is/are, the CPU requirements drop drastically. How many people would think a little Atom D2700 dual core can play 2 simultaneous streams of 4K UHD over wifi with room to spare?
