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I am looking into getting a NAS for the first time. I mainly want to use it for media streaming from backed up blurays and 4k blurays, and potentially music storage as well (mostly flac/high quality mp3).

The main questions I would have would be how much ram would be adequate, would nvme caching be a noticeable benefit, and is hardware transcoding necessary? For streaming media, it would mostly be to some 4k roku based tcl tvs (from around 2018) and some Xbox consoles (one x and series x). I have mostly been looking at synology for the ease of use with software, but am worried that the newer models do not have dedicated gpus for transcoding.

Hey there! Exciting venture into the NAS world! For your media streaming needs, especially 4K content to your Roku TVs and Xbox consoles, considering the Synology lineup, the DS920+ or DS923+ would be solid choices within your budget. Both handle multimedia tasks well, but the DS923+(local use) with its 4GB ECC RAM might offer a bit more future-proofing. As for NVMe caching, it's not crucial for media streaming, but if you plan to expand into more demanding tasks or additional users, it's a nice perk. Hardware transcoding is handy, but for your devices, software transcoding should suffice. Check out the NAS Finder tool (https://nascompares.com/nas-builder/) for personalized suggestions. Happy NAS hunting!