DS1520+ or DS1621+

[Enquiries]

I’m looking at both of these machines as I’d like a 5-Bay or higher NAS. My primary use cases would be:

1: Centralized Backup of 2-3 Home Macs
2: Plex Server hosting mostly 1080p and lower ripped DVDs (I may have some 4K content)
3: Shared file server for our house for important files including frequent offsite online access.

My biggest reasons for looking at this setup is speed and redundancy. I plan on having two drive fault tolerance with either SHR2 or RAID 6, on either device.

I have a UniFi Network installed in my house with switches capable of link aggregation, so on either unit I’d take advantage of that feature.

My biggest concern is that it seems the AMD on the 1621+ Seems to be built less for plex and more for business. On the other hand I’m worried about the lack of upgradability of the 1520+, with soldered memory and no possible addition of 10GB should I want it later.

I plan to populate these fully with 4TB ironwolf drives and to use 500GB drives in both cashe slots.

Wondering what the best ultimate unit would be. I’m not worried about the $100 price difference, but don’t want to go much more expensive than this. I also plan on keeping this for as long as humanly possible.

[ed]

DS1621+ is indeed a faster NAS, but not as multimedia friendly. It would cope with 4K better than DS1520+ while transcoding simply because CPU can convert those videos faster the DS1520+ media chip. But there is a price to pay. While it does transcode, other task performance will be affected.But none of this applies if you have compatible TVs. In that case, you would stream original videos files without the need for on-the-fly conversion.Faster CPU will also allow faster data transfer speeds. Celerons can deliver somewhere below 10GbE speeds (even if one day they released an adapter). Ryzen could easily cope with 10GbE upgrade card if you choose to add it.I hope this helps.