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By the time I put this together, these were really hard to find and very expensive. A lot of Plex forums suggested it was a real beast when it came to hardware transcoding for video. I had originally considered a different GPU, the PNY Quadro P2000.
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It may be a little large, but that gives me plenty of space for the components I want. I need a discrete box that makes no noise. I don’t need flashing lights with my NAS. It also has plenty of room for hard drives, which I absolutely love. It is also absolutely silent and does a great job with cable management. It’s big, roomy, and extremely well-designed. (NOTE: Full disclosure, the links above are affiliate links to Amazon.)Ī couple of notes on my hardware choices… But here is the estimated cost of the NAS assuming those were included: $1,357.47 + tax. Since I was repurposing the SSD and hard drives from my previous NAS, I didn’t buy those for this build. Hard Drives: 4 WD Blue 4TB 5400 RPM Hard Drives Powersupply: Fractal Design Ion+ Platinum 860W PSU RAM: Corsair LPX 32GB (2x16GB) 3200MHz C16 DDR4 DRAM Here are the specs for the new NAS:Ĭase: Fractal Design Define R5 – Mid Tower ATX case The major change, of course, was the hardware. But it just couldn’t handle all the scenarios I was throwing at it. For playing up to four files simultaneously that didn’t need to be transcoded, it worked like a champ. The previous NAS had served dutifully, but it was no match for 4K video (I don’t have a lot of it), it took forever to transcode files when I wanted to synchronize them with a device using Plex, and it couldn’t transcode pretty much any videos in real-time. After about a year and a half with my previous NAS (see here), I decided it was time for an upgrade.
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