Seagate offers HDDs designed for NAS devices with its IronWolf drives and Western Digital does the same with its Red series of HDDs. If you don’t have one already, keep in mind that most of Synology’s NAS drives ship without storage included. This is a two-bay NAS device that is compatible with both 3.5-inch SATA HDDs as well as 2.5-inch SATA HDD and SSDs.

Synology DS218+ specsįor this tutorial, I used Synology’s DS218+ NAS. Whether you’re already a Plex user or thinking about jumping in for the first time, follow along for how to get going with Plex on a Synology NAS drive (if you already have a Synology NAS device, skip below for how to install Plex). It also allows you to share your media library with others and even record free over the air TV with a compatible tuner. That includes Mac, iPad, iPhone, Apple TV, Windows, Android, game consoles, and more. If you’re new to the idea of using a service like Plex for your media library, the big benefits are that it allows you to store and stream your personal collection of TV shows, movies, music, and other media to almost any device (in a variety of file formats). Read along with our detailed guide on how to set up Plex on a Synology NAS drive. In addition to being able to configure a large amount of storage at a low cost and freeing up your desktop or notebook from the workload, a Plex setup with a NAS drive offers features like 4K video transcoding, the ability to record TV shows for free, and much more. Using a dedicated device like a Synology NAS drive to host your Plex media library offers a variety of advantages over using a Mac.

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