Conclusion – Best Synology NAS for Plex.Or should I just splurge and get the DS218+ for 60 more euros? The CPU might be weaker on paper but it is definitely better supported by Plex and other software. Do you think I would run into the same issue with DS218(+)?ĭo you think the RTD1296 of the DS218 would be enough to run Plex? On the specification page of Synology it says that the DS218 can even transcode 4K 60fps videos, but I would imagine that running Plex while do that could become too heavy for the chip. I do not think I need transcoding as I do not want to watch stuff on my phone/tablet and I do not think I ever used it to stream from Plex to my TV. My current NAS (really old) cannot play my MKVs whenever I try to turn on stuff like subtitles. Since I do not really have a good blu-ray player anymore I also would like to use the NAS as a Plex server to avoid turning on my desktop and run Plex on it whenever I want to watch the movies stored on the NAS. I need it to store some backups of some databases and of my blu-ray library. I am not planning to do VMs or anything on this NAS.

I am looking to buy a new NAS and I am undecided between the Synology DS218 and the DS218+. I considered building my own and installing FreeNAS but I don’t want to overlook the convenience of pre-made ones (especially hot-swapping and the pretty easy RAID management and disk upgrades).Īnyhow, getting to the point: I noticed that the main difference between the DS218 and the DS218+ are the CPU and RAM (DS218 sports a 64-bit RTD1296 ARM processor with max 2GB DDR4, while the DS218+ comes with a weak J3355 Celeron with max 6GB DDR3).ĭespite being a RISC processor, to me the ARM processor seems actually better than theĬeleron in terms of pure horsepower and I cannot fully understand the price premium of the 218+ as it sports a CISC - but weaker - CPU.

Setup plex on synology