I am fairly new to Plex and very new to the Forums.
I presently have a WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra 3TB, which I am looking at “upgrading”.
I ultimately want to start afresh with a new NAS which I can run Plex on and store my media on, which will be a mixture of Music (MP3/FLAC etc) and Movies (DVD/Blu-ray).
I have a Samsung 4K TV which can run Plex which I would want to watch the Movies via.
I am getting really confused having red the Plex NAS compatibility list and not understanding the “transcoding” section.
I would quite like to get a Synology NAS maybe a DS224+ or if I can get away with it a DS223j (and get bigger capacity NAS drives).
I’ve got a 920+ (4-bays, slot for a 5-bay expansion), and it’s nice. It had enough CPU to transcode up to 2 1080p videos at once (though I had some buffering with 2). This means that if your media isn’t directly playable by your TV (such as it being AV1 or HEVC encoded), the server will have to change it on the fly so your player can see it. If you can avoid transcoding, then the 920+ can handle dozens, possibly hundreds of streams at once. You are likely to be network congested before you are CPU congested there.
If you have the Plex Pass, you can utilize the graphics capability of the 920+ to “hardware” transcode video that way, which uses far less CPU than a “software” transcode which uses pure CPU. The 920+ is capable of hardware transcoding, while I think all the “J” or “play” models cannot. When I was looking into a new NAS, we picked the 920+ because of this, which ended up being a good thing because I ended up using Plex on the model later.
What I think I heard is that later Synology models use a CPU that doesn’t have hardware acceleration on it, but I haven’t looked at the charts to see if this is the case. What is confusing about the compatibility list for you?
I think my issue is that I want to try and get this right 1st time. The ripping, the storage, and the playback. I originally started looking at NAS drives as I want to upgrade mine (as I’ll need more storage when I’m ripping DVD/Bluray discs) which took me to the compatibility list. Looking over the list I was confused by the different transcoding options. So I decided to post on here.
Having had a further look I wondered if the better option was to buy an Intel NUC and make use of Intel Quick Sync?
As I have a 920+, all I could do was describe my own experience with it. EDIT BEGINS: It’s a decent server, but by no means a perfect solution. I have heard great things about a NUC, and even bought one for my parent to replace her current computer. It’s a nice little box that performs well, but it has absolutely no internal storage other than the OS drive, so you must either rely on external drives or a separate box, such as a Synology NAS.
BTW, I have since moved my server to a dedicated box. Since I have plenty of room (and a spare CPU from a sale), I built a traditional computer box and it now sits in a closet with Ubuntu, running Plex in a docker. It is fantastic, easily capable of handling Plex for the foreseeable future. My DS920+ meanwhile is used simply as a file server now. The Synology does a decent job as an emergency backup server, which worked out great when I was out of town and my server hard drive failed during a power outage.
I am considering adding drives to my server box, and maybe changing the OS to TrueNAS, so I can have an off-box backup of my precious Media on the Synology.
I have a 4 Bay Synology, but I only use it for storage. You cannot pass the GPU to a VM. No idea about docker though. I run Plex on a Barebones NUC with a N200 CPU which has Intel QuickSync, along with some other stuff . I’m using Debian as OS. This does the job nicely. The storage is attached via SMB. Just disable the automatic removal if a file goes missing to avoid issues when the SMB falls.
I apologise if my response suggested your reply was unhelpful. If you only have the 920+ you would only have experience of using it. I have purchase an Intel NUC to use as the server. I can then update/upgrade my NAS without having to worry about compatibility. Thanks again
@JudgeBread I purchased a NUC with a Intel® Core™ i5-3427U Processor - 3M Cache, up to 2.80 GHz which I will run Plex on. I also have some 4K content I am going to use to check its capabilities.
I will continue to look for a suitable NAS upgrade.
I understand. I hadn’t pointed out at the time that it isn’t that efficient of a server, so I just wanted to inform you that it was simply my experience with it, which was decent, but by no means a future-proof server. That’s why I agreed with the NUC suggestion, and let you know I had migrated my server off the NAS as well.
I didn’t know if you wanted an all-in-one solution which “just works”, or a future-proof one like I got now.
