Firs time NAS

[Enquiries]

I am looking into getting a NAS for the first time. I mainly want to use it for media streaming from backed up blurays and 4k blurays, and potentially music storage as well (mostly flac/high quality mp3).

The main questions I would have would be how much ram would be adequate, would nvme caching be a noticeable benefit, and is hardware transcoding necessary? For streaming media, it would mostly be to some 4k roku based tcl tvs (from around 2018) and some Xbox consoles (one x and series x). I have mostly been looking at synology for the ease of use with software, but am worried that the newer models do not have dedicated gpus for transcoding.

[ed]

Hey there! Exciting venture into the NAS world! For your media streaming needs, especially 4K content to your Roku TVs and Xbox consoles, considering the Synology lineup, the DS920+ or DS923+ would be solid choices within your budget. Both handle multimedia tasks well, but the DS923+(local use) with its 4GB ECC RAM might offer a bit more future-proofing. As for NVMe caching, it's not crucial for media streaming, but if you plan to expand into more demanding tasks or additional users, it's a nice perk. Hardware transcoding is handy, but for your devices, software transcoding should suffice. Check out the NAS Finder tool (https://nascompares.com/nas-builder/) for personalized suggestions. Happy NAS hunting!