I’m running a Synology DS918+ with Plex Server 1.29.0.6244. I have about 2.5TB of movies/TV shows, watching mostly in home over wired 1GB Ethernet successfully. I would like to upgrade my NAS to a more powerful box with more drives to be used as hot spare/a backup destination.
However it seems if I move to a xx21 or xx22 model I lose hardware transcoding which is a “plus” for the DS918+ even if I am not a big user of it:-). I could move to a DS920+ to keep hardware transcoding, however if I am going to make the move seems more sensible to go for a more recent option?
Any opinions or experience of performance gains when upgrading from DS918+ please? Maybe in other words how far up the Synology product line do I need to go so as not to see a reduction in performance?
Leave the media on the NAS. Buy a NUC or other small form factor PC, load Ubuntu, and run Plex on it.
I used to run PMS on a DS918+. It worked as expected, but I started to run into the limits of the Celeron CPU, especially if subtitle burning was needed.
A few months ago I picked up a Lenovo with an i5-10500T on eBay and loaded Ubuntu. It works great as a Plex server. It happily transcodes 40 Mbps Blu-ray rips to 4 - 8 Mbps for remote friends/family (my uplink bandwidth is limited, so remote streams are limited to 8 Mbps).
Also, no problem burning subtitles when transcoding 1080p media. The Celeron in the 918+ would choke if subtitle burning was required.
I have not stress tested it, but transcoding & tonemapping 4K HDR10 media work without issue. I don’t share 4K HDR media remotely, so have not performed a lot of testing in that area.
I added a DX517 expansion chassis which adds five storage bays. It was less expensive than a new NAS with 8+ slots. So far it is working fine.
Backup is to several USB drives. I use an Anker USB hub to connect the drives to the DS918+. It is not officially supported by Synology, but it has been in use for almost a year with no problems.
