Looking for a NAS for Plex but what about one of these mini PC's?

TexasBulldog74 · May 28, 2022

So im heading down the rabbit hole for a Plex media server for my house where its just me and my wife so there aren't going to be a lot of different devices streaming at the same time and I got to looking at these mini PC's... Is there a downside of using one of these opposed to something like a Synology DS218 or DS220+? I already have an external HDD dock that will hold 2 3.5" drives which i would connect via USB to the little NUC like pc but I thought I would ask to see if anyone has already gone down this road and learned it was just easier to go with a Synology.

I don't need a cloud like server, its just for movies. I have a lot of movies already, most MP4 using 264 or 265 codec but I do have original MKV's but I really don't need anything to stream those.

Thanks

dbx10 · May 28, 2022

2nd gen ryzen is enough for me and my emby server streams to sometimes up to 3 clients at once. I don't even have hardware acceleration either, it's just the CPU chugging along fine.

Anything recent with integrated graphics will be more than enough to transcode and stream 1080p movies to two clients at once. If you don't care about losing the data on it then a full blown NAS is not really necessary.