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Hi all, so I have been running my Plex server on an old dell PC running Windows (I do not know the specs or have access to them as it is at my parents house and Covid). I have about 5 External drives connected and 4 of which are completely full. The PC is pretty old now and doesn’t have the hardware capable of running Hardware Accelerated Transcoding. I want to buy a NAS to run Plex from and EVENTUALLY get rid of all my external drives and put all the files onto NAS drives but I am low on money so my question is…
If I get a NAS to use as my PLEX server (with no drives yet) but connect it to my PC where my external drives have all my files I use for Plex, is that possible to run Plex from my NAS like that? And will it transcode with the NAS hardware or with the PC hardware since that’s where the files are?
I know it’s kind of backwards to how a NAS runs and I haven’t heard of anyone running a system like that? I just don’t trust having all my files on 5 External drives like that and I want my system to be able to run accelerated Transcoding.
It might work if your NAS supports the addition of external drives (should work for most; only exception I’m aware of is WD MyCloud models). You’ll need to make those drives available as network drives and mount them as “shares” in the local file system of the NAS.
It might be easier to actually migrate the data at some point 
If the server is running on your NAS, it’ll only use the NAS’ resources for the server itself (media aside). So the old PC will no longer be used/seen at all – also not for transcoding.
Plex does not support “shared transcoding”.
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Thanks @tom80H !! That answers everything I needed to know!! Awesome help! 
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