Hi, I could really use some help here. I’m brand new to this and really don’t know much about this. I’m looking to get mad setup as I don’t want my main pc on all the time.
I’m looking for some recommendations. Not really looking to spend more than $500 or so, doesn’t matter what brand to me. Looking for 4 bays if possible to handle around 40tb. Would also like it to be able to handle transcoding mostly blu rays on a couple screens at the same time.
you’ll run out of luck with that.
NAS’ are notoriously underpowered. The few ones with a halfway decent CPU allowing transcoding are going to explode your budget.
also… don’t forget that most NAS don’t come with drives included… 4 decent drives adding to a total of 40 TB are easily around 300$ per HDD.
when shopping for a NAS allowing transcoding you need to be careful. There’s a lot of models promoting their capability to transcode. In many systems that’s restricted to native apps – Synology is e.g. using a lot of ARM based CPUs which are not supported by Plex when it comes to HW transcoding. Let’s take the current 418play… good news: it’s using an Intel CPU (should be supported by Plex?); not so good news… it only gets a Passmark of ~1300 points (CPU benchmark). For one 1080p to be transcoded @ 10 Mbit/s you need to consider approx. 2k points… and that’s already less than half of Blu-Ray quality (reference).
If you talk about multiple parallel transcodes and already got the drives, you might want to look into some mini pc such as an Intel NUC.
If you want to follow the NAS line… those models aren’t totally bad. You could also take a look at some of the QNAP devices – however when buying one you should be aware of their restrictions and constraints!
