NAS recommendations for Plex

What all do you want to accomplish with your NAS and what kind of budget are you comfortable with? I just purchased an Synology RS-820 (4 bay rackmount) with 8TB drives. My first synology device and its been great so far.

I have a DS918+ with the DX517 expansion. This is my first and only NAS, but I've enjoyed using it. Be careful about what WD drives you buy. I think it's straightened out now, but WD sold some red NAS drives which were not really red NAS drives. I forget the details, but several people (me included) got screwed. I'm going to need to upgrade my drives anyway, so I'll just replace those first but it still sucks.

I will probably get the Synology as well. I presume they are not SMR? I know I have to dig and make sure as they won't work with NAS

I run one from a Dell optiplex and a WD USB external. Stream 4k to my theater room and other TVs. HDR , Atmos. Works perfect.

I am currently just on my PC. I want more storage and would prefer not having Raid 0 or 1

So i went with the synology cause my older netgear was just old and like drankenstein with a rigged desktop power supply as replacement when original was fried. I had always been intrigued by synology and wanted to give them a try. I use my nas to store media (plex runs on desktop server), docs, applications.

I got the bigger drives to have capacity for storage of all the pics/vids for backing up cell phones. Which i decided on when google photos started counting towards google drive space, and can setup whatever users i want to use it that way. I also have my scanner setup to scan to the nas for centralized location/ease when someone in house scans. I havent messed around with many additional add-ins from synology, but i could charge clients to use it as storage backup if need arises based on their backup needs.

I can also run VMs or docker apps from it if needed.

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I am looking at the DS918+ and using WD drives

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Do you mean the DS920+? You can't go wrong with Synology, but I'm not sure the 918+ is even available anymore.

If you can wait, there is an expected upgrade coming in the Spring 2022. However, if you can find a 920+ for a good deal over the holidays, it has plenty enough power to run Plex.

Also, if you're looking at WD drives, I would highly recommend the Red Plus lineup. These are drives designed for NAS.

Also, rebuilding an array could take days/week, depending on the size of the storage needing to be rebuilt and the disk speed.

Probably much faster to move that data over a gig link from a backup

Have the qnap 453A for the last couple of years configured at raid 0 with 4 - 8tb drives that I shucked working like a champ for now. It does 1080 files direct and transcoding on the fly good enough. My next one will be a 4k workhorse though.