Firstly, my apologies if this is in the wrong sub-forum. There didn’t seem to be a “general NAS questions” option…
So today as I was about to buy a new 8TB external drive I thought “maybe its time I invest in a NAS” and started looking around for an affordable option.
I then read that many NAS solutions can run Plex Media Server and I thought “Great! Kill two birds with one stone”. But then I read you need a very specific kind of NAS in order to do transcoding and the one I was looking at, the QNAP TS-231P-US wouldn’t support it.
Currently my PLEX set-up is a bunch of external hard drives plugged into an old MacBook Pro in order to stream to my Apple TV or iPad. Most content I download is between 720p-1080p and I usually will re-wrap MKVs to mp4s, though sometimes I’m too lazy and just throw it in the watchfolders for PLEX to scan.
Currently I don’t stream anything remotely because it doesn’t work with my current setup (can’t figure out the port forwarding).
So my question is: do I really need to worry about the ability to transcode? I don’t think I’ve ever streamed to more than one device at a time, and all my devices I’m streaming to are Apple devices which as far as I know support the h264/x264 content I’m downloading/ripping.
I suppose I could just buy a NAS and point the MacBook Pro to the files on the server and still use it to do the transcoding, but it’d be nice to be able to remove it from the setup and just run everything off the NAS.
I’ll admit I’m new to all of this kind of tech so not really sure what solution makes the most sense/works the best, but if anyone can offer insight I’d greatly appreciate it!
