Best Plex NAS to Buy in 2024 (so far)

That is to say, today we want to return to the topic of Plex Media Server and analyze the

best

Plex Media Server NZ that you can buy in late 2023 and in

2024

we saw a lot of new hardware arrive on the scene in the last 12 months and although not all was absolutely Tip Top, it's worth arguing that some of this is certainly in the realm of utilizing the Plex Media Server and turning your own M media that you've collected over the decade into your own private Netflix is ​​certainly going to be of interest to you, but before we get into the three Naes that I recommend for individual reasons that you should choose if you're looking at 1080P or 4K and indeed 8K Plex, now we'll talk more about that later, a few quick disclaimer details.

Outside of door number one, we have right now the NAS Compares and Nas Builder tool that Eddie has been working on that allows you to find the

best

Nas for your budget, so for example, if we were to look at this system here. if we wanted 4B, sorry, we wanted to store ourselves 20 t uh 30 TB of storage, we're saying we want to have at least four storage issues, one disk drive failure or we can add whatever budget we want and then down here we can move on. and choose that we want to access Plex Media Server and then either just general multimedia or pull boxes, say how many users are going to access it, the type of connection speeds that we want, we can go ahead and click the button and it will do it. make recommendations for Nas solutions based on the parameters and you can play with them, choosing, for example, whether you want to go with 4k on its own, expanding some of that storage capacity and some of that redundancy by adding some additional features and you'll move on. and modify those results accordingly based on your needs, it's a pretty useful little tool and I recommend you check it out if you need a little help using the current solution not only for Plex but for other services as well.

Next, we have created others. Videos here on the channel in the past that talk about how to get the most out of your Plex Media Server, as well as mistakes people make on a regular basis. We also have it in the form of an article where we analyze the eight things that people always overlook. before you guys buy a Nas re

plex

media server and finally before we continue it's worth highlighting that there was a Nas that almost made the list but unfortunately it was delayed in release and therefore since I don't physically have it here, I can't include it. that and that's a new NZ from terramaster the F4 424 and the F4 424 Pro.

I'll have a video on this very soon if I'm not already reviewing this new Intel n95 and Intel I3 uh affordable 2 and 4 Bay Nas but You can learn more about them in the link in the description, and finally, it's worth highlighting that if you're not familiar with the utility of Plex Media Server in your own Nas solution, it's worth highlighting that it's not just about the quality of the media. you are seeing its not just about the power of the nas its actually about the competition the reason i have this nas here on the screen this is a much older generation nas this is the ds220 plus released in 20 20, which was most recently updated. an upgrade, I should say with a DS 224 plus, but this system here is compatible with Plex Media Server.

If we want, we can select Plex there, we have it here on this screen and it will play multimedia fine. Here there are 3 megabits per second h. .264 1080p media file is playing like an absolute dream and while it's doing it in the background we can open the resource monitor here, take a look right at that CPU, we can see that the CPU is doing absolutely fine down there, it's this little guy number here, at the bottom, the utilization is very small, in fact, we can go directly to the on-screen monitor and see that the CPU utilization to get it to the top is not that high, the file plays there in second plane absolutely fine, now one of the reasons why that file plays absolutely fine is because we are using an h.264 file h.264 is a compression technique that is used to bring the movie you see onto the big screen in the cinema to the comfort of your living room. make these larger productions smaller i.e. open source anyone can use it but there is a better compression technique known as HC also known as h.265 highly efficient video codec and this compression technique is even more efficient and has been developed online. with 4K and even early 8K, but the problem is that it is proprietary and licensing is required.

Why do I mention this well? You should check if you have a lot of hgvc media in your collection and also the devices you use to watch it. you might be trying to use just a mobile phone to watch here, you might be using a high powered MacBook, whatever device you're using, if it has an hvvc license that will make a difference. Now to put it into perspective, here we have a 10 megabits per second um HD file, so 1080p a bit rate of 10 megabits per second is pretty high, it's hvv v c in compression if we play this file here and look at the bottom on the screen, they will automatically need to convert that file.

I can't play it natively because Chrome doesn't have the license natively built in there and as you can see, even though it played, the CPU utilization of the file increased to 22% and has now decreased as the file is concluding and managed to get the job done there, but it came up now, that was the 10 megabits per second H h.265 file. Now here we have the Windows client tool. This is the Windows Plex tool, so when you have Plex on your phone, when you're on your tablet. on your TV it's the client tools, not the media server, let's find the same file playing from this same New Zealand, so this is again the 10 megabits per second HD HC file, we play it there and immediately you can see that it is It is playing in the original quality, no. compression without conversion none of that it just plays immediately and the utilization doesn't increase as you can see the utilization of that file still keeps the CPU running absolutely fine and that's because you don't need to convert the file because the device is playing it , in this case, the Windows client tool here has that codec supported, not a codec compression technique, so it's very important when you look at a Plex Media Server now that your client devices can actually play the files and if can, To play the files, it is important that you know that the naze you are using has enough power and competence to get the job done and this is one of the main reasons why two of the three naze that we are going to talk about today were selected, but for now that's enough disclaimer, let's start with our top three, the sonology DS 224 plus.

I think some feathers were ruffled when sonology released this in summer 2023 using an existing hardware configuration on the j41 125 processor we already saw them. During the launch in the 2020 generation, there were some users who were less satisfied than others because sonology had become too reliant on this slightly older hardware configuration; However, sonology has a history of taking those pre-existing hardware configurations and architecture and moving them to the previous bottom tier in the Next Generation, what I mean is that they take what was once considered fully featured in Pro Schuma and make it the standard class in the next generation and the ds24 plus is a good example of that by kicking the door with a The Intel quad-core processor, the Intel J 4125 at 2.0 GHz, can be clocked up to 2.7.

It's a pretty decent CPU and processor. It also has 350 MHz integrated graphics that can go up to 750 when needed and the integrated graphics are what allow this. to become an entry level 4K trending code box, that's right, this is not just for playing 4K, it can actually do that conversion that we mentioned of many 4K media contents now, how do we know this well along with the review that are you seeing here? on the screen where we discuss the pros and cons of the system, not only with permanent Plex Media Server, we also did quite extensive testing of Plex Media Server here on the channel earlier this year, so 3 months ago you can see the video that we saw there. and we tested all kinds of files, we went ahead with h.265 H2 64, we went for a kid with 1080p 720p but also 4K, we went through all kinds of tests and it played 85% of the files we threw at it, it was very powerful.

And the capable box there in our testing and again from time to time I'm going to talk today is a New Zealand where we've done extensive performance testing and they'll all be linked in the description below, but the reason why this Naz is Consider the best entry-level 4K box, despite its ability to play those files and hardware transcoding support, if you use a Plex Media Server pass, on top of that, it's a NZ sonology and sonologies with DSM 7.2 are still considered the best software option on the market today and I think it is necessary to mention that no matter what solution you are looking for for Place Media Server, you will want to maximize your investment when you want to maximize that investment, this box means that you could be using it to watch your movies for a few hours a day, you want to use it for the other 20 hours, if possible, to do other things to get your money back and DSM is the best option for that when you have support for things like sonology, sonology, sonology, office, sonology. chat sonology monitoring station and all the applications and services that are included in its platform and this system comes at a modest price where at the moment it costs $299, but we have regularly seen it on sale for as low as $250, we saw it on Black Friday on Prime Day and there are many intermittent offers, so although it costs $299, you can definitely get it cheaper when you compare prices and when you look at our review, you can discover the existing offers on empty and bundled packages. deals linked below in that article, but what I mean is that this isn't just a Plex Media Server, it's an excellent entry-level Nas boox 4K and, although its hardware is a bit modest, I won't call it the most powerful solution. , but for the price you pay for the hardware and software and the overall return on investment, the Roi DS 224 plus technology is an excellent option from Nas and in 4k for its modest size it performed extremely well and therefore , such as the 4K input Plex Nas Solution.

I recommend it as a surprisingly left-wing option. I think some of you might think, but I'm going to pick Plex NAD as the best all-rounder type in 2023 and going into

2024

. Is this the OA Gen 2 shop lock shop? Series available in 2 bay, 4 bay and 6 bay, now yes, we are focusing, you know, exclusively on Plex Media Server for today's video and I will say right now, in terms of access, this system is a great option among them , why am I bringing? this is now available for this well, despite its price it can retail for 24 uh sorry, the 24 and the six bay start at around 3 to 350 up to about 599, this system comes with four hard drive storage bases for NVM ebays as internally, so if you want to use particularly com

plex

media and do not want to eliminate the bottleneck that can sometimes be associated with the performance of the hard drives and the storage system, and if you want play with native 8K media, this will allow you to do so thanks to those mvme bays in gen3*1 which provide 1000 megs per second each for that storage media there and with the depreciation cost of mbme M2 SSDs until 2024, It's a good way to compensate for that update, but it's not like that.

Finishing there, this system again, as expected, we went ahead and did our Plex Media Server tests on this performed extraordinarily well, but it performed well for two very specific reasons now coming to a much newer generation Celeron CPU than the sonology we talked about, that Celeron. J 4125 comes with the m515, a 2.0 GHz CPU that can be boosted up to 2.9 GHz when needed but more importantly, it also features integrated graphics that can be boosted up to 800 MHz when needed. There's just more under the hood to get the job done. but the second reason why it's really intriguing and the second reason why it worked very, very well in our tests was because, if we log in to the device here that I have here set to nas system in the options menu here, we have got something called Media Mode now Media Mode is very, very important, it's the only brand I've seen that can do this and it's a pretty interesting option on the back end, one of the options, one of the problems we found in some New Zealand.

The systems in 2020 and 2021 were the controllers and graphics integrated into the CPU which were not a better match for that aplex media server and even though you use aplex pass and you should be able to use theHardware transcoding, meaning you're actually using the built-in architecture to do the job, wasn't being done correctly and you were forced to use software transcoding or inefficient drivers. Multimedia mode allows the system to shift gears much like you would when off-roading a car or engine. I don't drive, can you say that it allows the system to be more optimized, a more optimized multimedia board?

When we did we got this system to play light 8K media as well and again when you look at things like the Asus Door Flash series which is an M2 mvme optimized system when you have it in Media mode 8K playback was actually possible , but if you don't want to spend that amount of money and want to focus much more on hard drives, this is SL, an excellent system purchase option. and when you get into the hardware specs and find out more about what you can do with 2.5 gigb EET, the optional shift from those MVM M2s towards a 10gb gabit and a 10GB ethernet network connectivity port, there's a lot to I like it, here there is also support for a remote control, either using Wi-Fi or an infrared remote control, on top of that, there is even an HDMI output that allows you to have local access to Plex Media, so here is one of his videos on his old channel where you can enable access to Plex via the HDMI output used with a keyboard, video and mouse. a Blu um, sorry, an infrared remote or a Wi-Fi remote will allow you to access your Plex Media Server from the comfort of your couch and access the media natively now not an official Plex Media app Server and HDMI app availability has been sporadic at best, but it's still nice to have that support so you don't have to rely too much on the network when you could literally just access the nas directly as a box. local media for Plex while still allowing the media box to be accessed remotely. all users connected in their 1080P and 4K multimedia now there are prices on this box.

Again, as we mentioned, it fluctuates depending on where you look and depending on your region, availability will be different and again you may see a price that way. Outside of what we would like to see when you look at the UK or look at other sites like B&H, the pricing becomes much more reasonable now when it comes to the software already mentioned, the software is still pretty good. They are not up to par with sonology software and are missing some of the AAA Plus apps as mentioned so this ROI can take advantage of everything, but what they have is still pretty good, they have a wider selection. of third party apps and services available they have mobile apps for IOS and Android they have desktop apps they have a large number of apps uh apps btrfs support they have their own local sync tool that you can install on your local system they have photo, video apps and music, they have a virtual machine application, Docker application, it's all there, it's all at your disposal, not everything is as good and smooth as sonology, just like your surveillance application is not that good.

Like sonies, their VM app is third party and uses a virtual box, but if you weren't going to use them anyway and were just looking for a robust, high-performance Flix media server, now this is the best all-rounder right now in 2023, Yes look. From last year's video, you'll know that this is probably never going to be any other way. Qap TVs h874 is by far the best TurnKey Plex Media Server NZ I have seen. Now I'll have to add a bunch of caveats. an important TurnKey VAR, your M. All the solutions I've talked about today are combined hardware and software solutions that are pretty much out of the box.

You still have to buy your hard drives and SSDs. Secondly, this is a system that is implemented directly. away and has enough hardware to do anything in terms of multimedia, what do I mean by anything? Well, even throughout the course of my review, I was reviewing a lot of the hardware, this is late 2022 and since then, qap has released several versions of this box that integrate things like Thunderbolt 4 Conn AC ity, this system not only It played all the tests I could run up to 120, 2, and 400 megabits per second 4K, but it could play several of them at once.

I threw everything in this box, all those files you are seeing on the screen are high end 2 and 400 megabits per second 4K HC files, this is borderline. Unlimited, in addition to that, it should not be suspended. Christmas last year, then I moved on. and I opted for 8K transcoding and this system was able to convert high-end 8K files weighing around 1 Gigabyte every 30 seconds of data, absolutely huge data. When we got to the end of testing, the only limitation we encountered was our client. The hardware and trying to run 8K on our local recording system was the bottleneck, not even the nas, the nas was just sitting there tapping its watch saying, come on, give me the best you've got, so if you're looking at a system on this moment and you want something genuine.

Turnkey h874 TVs are the best option out there for a turnkey solution for Plex Media Server and when you dig deeper into the hardware you can see why even though it is a 12th Gen Intel system this system is spectacular. an I9 i7 or i5 processor with integrated graphics which actually rivals some lower tier graphics cards and that's just its own integrated graphics, in addition to being a Gen 4 system, it supports Gen 4 SSD performance which means a Gen 4 SSD 4 that has arrived again. A low price that can reach a potential of 6,000 or 7,000 megabytes per second could be used for that high end multimedia, so even if in a few years the internal power supply is somehow not good enough for your multimedia, which is crazy, you can still install media that can offer that. uh, media through storage at 6 or 7000, as mentioned, so fast that the CPU will be so assisted that again, any client device that is receiving this media will be its only real bottleneck and as an 8K client, the Hardware is still at its peak. childhood I still believe that at this point today's system will continue to reproduce your Decades of media performance perfectly well, what's the downside? woo that price tag, price tag hitting early, the cheapest I could find was this 2000 nicker box if you want to go for that high performance I9 model, the I9 with 10g and 64 gigs of memory, you're looking at 3 to 3 and 12,000, depending on the availability and price of your own local currency and all that TNC nonsense.

It's not cheap, there's a reason you get all that hardware for that price, but it's still a great investment, but if you're serious about your multimedia, if you're someone who's going to graduate to AK media on your next 5 to 10 years, if you are someone who has the latest media device TVs and want to make sure that your media collection you store is already ripped from your mental UHD 4K Blu-ray media to a local copy, this is probably going to be the best option Future-proof If you think or have a feeling you'll need that kind of coverage for years to come and if you're someone who shares your media with a large collection of friends and family, this is another reason to go for this, even if you don't If you were to go for next generation media and you only have very high standard general media, these can micromanage a wide variety of users connected simultaneously, not only with the implex media server but also of course, and here I am logging into a different Nas device.

Here you can use qts and Qs, which is a platform compatible with the ZFS file system, which means greater inconsistency, greater inconsistency checks internally, as well as greater inline compression and greater inline compaction, which means that when the data is on it, you can run a multitude of different operations within Qs to save even more space as this media gets bigger and with higher SSD utilization and SSD handling, meaning blockers can be adjust according to the io in which the individual multimedia operations are performed rather than standard OS level file sizes, uh, data block sizes, this is a system that can really be customized and optimized beautifully and with a wide range of proprietary and AAA Plus applications that truly rival those of sonology.

AI powered recognition in surveillance in photo recognition uh virtual machine management uh container applications office applications backup tools synchronization tools all of which are your own and all of those applications for your Mac desktop uh Windows iOS Android even Linux devices is a powerful system you talk about there and a really great return on investment Take advantage of the Roi factor to install it, it is just a solid system and there is a reason why when we reviewed the results of that review we gave it 9.0, it is one of the third Naz devices with the highest score that we have analyzed.

There are doubts. brands around qap and its handling of bolt and ransomware, which we always have to mention and will continue to mention for at least 5 to 7 years after the fact, but still, if that doesn't concern you or if you already have. your firewall and you will be up to date and with managed security that won't even show up on your radar and ultimately making you the ultimate AK Plex Media Server Nas and that's it, those were the best Nas I would recommend for Plex Media Server based on the price . in the capability based on comprehensive multimedia support and the best return on investment you can get now before we continue, just a few quick things, there is a link in the description to the full guide that breaks down how we chose these nazes, as well as others features and things to look out for when looking at a Nas media server for Flex, but it doesn't stop there, and there will be some of you who watched this video and said I could have built something better for that, that thing is really expensive, what an absolute pain, what a big swiz or scam.

I can definitely build my own for those of you who follow the channel. I think Friday the 22nd will presumably be released. This is my johnb N3 built with the I9. 599 which is a 12g i 91 board, we built a John bonaz from scratch and we will do a Plex performance test on this system. In the New Year it could even arrive just before New Year 2023, so stay tuned, but if you want. early access to all of these videos I highly recommend becoming one of our YouTube members or head over to NAS Compares and join our membership tier, it costs £4 per month £8 per month or £18 per month but they all have different benefits that They range from accelerated support to getting early access to the videos on our monthly Zoom where we talk about everything happening in storage directly with you and it's a private Zoom just for those members, but all of those tiers will give you early access to these videos to As they become available there, IT members have had this video accessible for days and when you go to our R1 review, where we discuss this potential new DIY Nas along with the R7 Naas of Use and another video on Plex performance and 8K performance tests. in the new Thunderbolt version of the 874, they have had access to these videos for quite some time now and if you want access to a lot of these videos early and more, check out those membership levels, other than that if you need more support and if you want free support , you can always take advantage of the free tips section on NAS compared.

It's on the right side of every page in NAS Compare. There is nas Builder, the section of free tips and links to all the individual tools that Ed has developed to help you choose the right drives for your Nas system at the best price and get the best price per terabyte for storage drives and other uses for your Nas, but again, if you don't want to use those services, we also have Discord for you. you can use, we have our forum there and we recommend other support platforms that vary in terms of official use and third party community support and I recommend you check them out, but other than that, thank you very much for looking, I hope you do.

I've had a great 2023. I hope to see you in 2024 and other than that, I'll see you next time.