Purchase Synology SD920+, vs building my own

[Enquiries]

I am interested in getting my first NAS, and I like what I see with Synology NAS. I am also interested in having Plex as a feature, and a virtual machine that I can have Microsoft Windows 10 or 11 on it, and and if it the NAS is powerful enough to do some upper lever PC gaming, that would be nice as well. However, now I am wondering if I could install Synology DSM 7.1 on a Windows PC with 5 Nas Hard drives. Thoughts?

[TribalHound]

As a first NAS I'd suggest you're probably better off buying one as a complete solution until you're at least familiar with the OS - alternatively aim a little lower if you want to host your own DSM on a windows PC... like just setup a basic file station & Plex to start with.

You're certainly going to run into issues running a VM inside a 'Virtual NAS', inside a PC. That's just too many tiers of virtuality that even Hyper-V can't cope with & you'd be better running a VM inside your PC alongside a Virtual NAS inside your PC, but the RAM & CPU demand, plus Hyper-V only runs on Windows 10 / 11 Pro means you've got license costs to consider as well.

To run Plex comfortably you'll ideally need a NAS with an Intel Celeron, 2 or preferably 4 cores, transcoding capability & min 4GB RAM. Add a single running VM for Windows 10 / 11 and you're going to need those 4 cores and up that to 8GB RAM. Of course you can have multiple VMs you pause / resume or shutdown and reboot, but Windows consumer edition VMs eat away at your NAS resources. Server OS is a little less intensive, so two side by side doing basic stuff works, but even Server 2022 is quite hungry.

Add gaming to the mix and you blow the budget with multiple VMs and Plex... Time to start looking for i3 / i5 processors and 16GB RAM minimum.

Of course, you can start small with a DS720+ to learn from with a couple of 4-6TB NAS HDDs - that should give you full NAS capability with Plex and occasional VM usage. But if you're determined to go NAS / Plex / Gaming / VMs there reallt are only two choices - the QNAP TVS-x72 ranges or the replacement model (just released) the TVS-hx74. Robbie's done a series of videos on the former and has already started reviewing the latter - even though none have been shipped yet.

Hope this helps - and welcome to the world of NAS - I can see from your first questions you'll be here for some considerable time to come.

Whatever decision you arrive at, drop Robbie a line before you buy - he might just have a referral link to save you a little towards some bigger drives / faster network cable. Sounds like you'll be needing both.