New server - Mac Mini vs NAS

Plex Media Server
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Hi

I’ve been a proud Plex user for 10 years.

I’m currently running it off a 2011 iMac with hard drives holding my content.

It’s finally dying and it’s time to buy a new system.

My choice is:

Do I buy a Mac mini which is cost effective but keep all my hard drives. I won’t be using this for anything else.

Or

Buy a NAS set up which has the smaller footprint but will be much more expensive.

I have about 24tb of plex data

I suppose I’m really asking is there a performance difference?

Is there a technical reason to go with one over the other?

If I do go NAS any suggestions for best plex one?

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What are you trying to accomplish? How critical is your 24TB of plex data to you?

One of the key benefits of the small all-in-one NAS boxes is typically data resiliency through some kind of RAID technology. I.E. That way if I have a (1) out of (4) 6TB drives fail, I still have access to that data.

In terms of what you should look at… the answer is… IT DEPENDS…

  • Are all your Plex clients local or remote?
  • What kind of plex clients do you have (TV’s, Streaming Sticks, etc.)?
  • How many concurrent streams will you be handling?
  • What is your upload bandwidth on your ISP?
  • What kinds of media are you playing (4K, HDR, 7 channel audio)?
  • Do you deal with subtitles?

All of these things can have an impact on how powerful of a NAS or not you need, especially as it relates to transcoding. Since you don’t have a plex-pass subscription, you can’t leverage the HW accelerated transcoding so you are putting additional load on the CPU of your Plex Server (if you need to transcode)

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