I know this because I came across a bug in the Plex app for Samsung TVs which was causing videos to be transcoded unnecessarily.

Unfortunately the DS118 isn’t powerful enough for 1080p transcoding (from a Blu Ray source, i.e. I ended up connecting the USB drive to the MacBook instead and using FreeFileSync to backup over the network. The initial backup to a USB drive (connected directly to the USB 3.0 port on the NAS) copied at a shocking 6MB/s, ran for days, and then failed at the finish. Lots of complaints about it over on the Synology forums. One comment I would make about the Synology (unrelated to Plex), is if you’re looking to use the NAS to back up your Plex library, be warned that Synology’s Hyper Backup software is absolutely appalling. Let me know if you want me to try anything else. When using Direct Play only there’s hardly any CPU usage at all, which is what you’d expect. The CPU rarely goes over 25%, but that’s just because of the audio transcoding.

Nowhere near the RAM limit which was my main worry before buying. One is 4K UHD Direct Play, one is 1080p Direct Play, and the last is 1080p with Direct Stream for the video, and the audio transcoded from DTS to AAC (since Samsung removed support for DTS on their newer TVs). Building the library took far longer than it should have done, and browsing the library on Plex clients is a bit slower than when it was running it on the MacBook, but that might be because now the index is on an HDD rather than an SSD.īut I can’t complain about the playback. So I got Plex (beta) running on the DS118 and it seems to work just fine. The other option I was looking at was the DS218+ for the Intel CPU and extra RAM, but obviously it comes at a much higher cost.Īre there any DS118 owners here who have tried Plex and wished they’d gotten a slightly beefier model? Or even any DS218+ owners who aren’t happy with how well Plex performs? Any advice offered will be much appreciated! I’m not too bothered about a RAID setup, so since I don’t need to transcode video would a DS118 be sufficient? Or is the 1GB RAM too limiting on Plex even without transcoding? I would have some other processes running like the download manager and maybe a Git server. My media is mostly Blu Ray and 4K rips which can be played by both my TVs either Direct Play or Direct Stream, but sometimes the audio needs transcoding (latest Samsung TVs don’t support DTS audio, it transcodes to AAC). I’m currently running Plex from my MacBook but for various reasons want to move it to a NAS which runs 24/7. I was wondering if I could get some advice from existing Synology owners here.

Synology for plex