ASK NC

I am wondering on the best bundle for my planned NAS, mostly for Plex with some other minor add-ons.

I'd like to get either 6 or 8TB drives and am trying to decide amongst the various flavours of WD & Seagate. Am I better off compromising on storage for the up-spec HDD models?

Planned usage is mostly for Plex at home (replacing a purpose -built PC) with some light usage for some other services like backup and photos etc.

My Plex library is (at least 20Tb) and is a mix of mostly 1080p, 720p and 4K content. Most 4K movies are compressed to 4-6Gb size with HEVC encoding.

If you only plan on streaming locally at your home and your TVs support those 4K files, you could get a cheap Realtek-based NAS such as DS218play. HDD are not very important in 1 or 2 bay systems. WD Red plus seems to be quieter.
If you do need remote 4k access and you want on the flt transcoding, you may need to consider TS-473A with a dedicated PCIe GPU.


I hope this helps.