Plex is a great platform to sort yall your favorite media and enjoy the latest movies. All you need to get started is a network-attached storage (NAS) enclosure and any server will do, so long as it’s able to install Plex Media Server. Where specifications truly matter is with 4K transcoding, which requires quite the beefy processor.
Synology DiskStation DS920+ is a pretty good NAS considering the asking price. If you found this enclosure to be a little out of reach, it’s currently on sale right now for Black Friday, knocking off a full $110.
What makes the DiskStation DS920+ pretty good for Plex use is the four available drive bays, which is a considerable upgrade compared to a two-bay, especially if you take RAID configurations into account. It’s powered by an Intel Celeron J4125 processor with 4GB of RAM, the latter which can be upgraded.
There are some other highlights too, like the two M.2 slots that can be used for PCIe NVMe cache to speed up overall performance, and two Gigabit LAN ports that can be combined through link aggregation. No 5Gb or 10Gb, unfortunately. Finally, for USB, we have three 3.0 ports in total.
The processor is good enough for 4K playback, but only just. If you need to transcode media — which is what’s required when the receiving device (be it your TV or PC) does not support the same file type as what’s stored on the NAS — it can struggle, more so when multiple people are using it.
Still, at $440 it’s a great value NAS. Synology offers one of the best OS offerings for NAS, closely followed by QNAP and ASUSTOR. It’s the best Plex-friendly NAS discount for Black Friday we’ve come across thus far. Be sure to check out our collection of the best Black Friday NAS deals for more options.
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This post was written by Rich Edmonds and was first posted to WindowsCentral
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