Do I need a gpu?

[Enquiries]

I’m buying my first NAS, mostly for file management and redundancy for family home movies and photos. None of the videos are 4k, and I have no plans to rip and store DVDs on the NAS. I’m thinking of getting a synology DS923+ but I read reviews and comments about the lack of a gpu making hardware transcoding impossible. Is this something that will impact watching the home movies/videos from the NAS?

[ed]

The lack of a GPU in the Synology DS923+ means that it cannot perform hardware transcoding of video files. However, for your use case of simply storing and accessing home movies and photos, this should not be a significant issue.

Without hardware transcoding, video playback will rely on the CPU for decoding, which could result in higher CPU usage and potentially lower playback quality if multiple streams are being played simultaneously. However, this should not be a problem if you are only playing one video at a time.

If you anticipate needing to transcode videos in the future, such as if you plan to stream them to remote devices with limited bandwidth, then you may want to consider a NAS with hardware transcoding capabilities. However, for your current use case, the Synology DS923+ should be more than capable of handling your storage and redundancy needs.