Plex Media server on 64-bit Windows 10 PC with a 1TB M.2 Samsung 960 EVO
Media Stored on a Synology DS918+ using link aggregation with 4 x 6TB HDD’s in RAID
Both are connected directly to my router.
I know people will say why not just install Plex Media Server on the NAS, but i migrated my media onto the NAS and kept the media server running on the PC and it works quite well for me, and my PC is much better at transcoding and what not.
My question is; would i see any improvement using the M.2 SSD cache on the Synology DS918+?
I am not too sure on the benefits on the SSD caching for Plex, but i am curious to whether there would be any improvements if i did use it.
Note there is nothing stopping you from running PMS on both the 918+ and your existing system. Try it on the 918+, if you don’t like it, uninstall. Be sure and enable hardware acceleration if you’ll be transcoding. The Celeron CPU isn’t strong enough by itself.
That is my setup, but the SSD / M.2 probably not going to be factor unless you play the same movie over and over. They that unless you have a small office, that SSD cache really won’t give you performance. Better to go with faster drives than caching on the one offs.
The 918+ can handle several streams at once, but not sure what the hard limit is. All my movies are DVD quality.
If you have an 918+ load it up and try it for yourself. If you don’t like it, go back to your Windows based server.
Personally SSD might be a benefit for Plex library access, metadata etc… for streaming you will not have any benefits. Regarding its “power” I have managed to test 3x4K transcode streams (pushed to 1080p) at the same time with about 20.30 docker images and SS on top of it all with 1 IP camera. CPU was at about 55%-60%. Pretty powerfull machine. Its all about how much transcoding streams you need at any given point.
Also the M.2 SSD are cache only, you can’t address them or store file level data on them - meaning you can’t designate to use the M.2 SSD as a file storage device outside of caching.
