Current setup is PMS running on a Synology 5-bay, and another PMS running on a Shield Pro. The NAS server is primarily used for remote streaming, while the Shield serves to my home LAN (AppleTVs mainly).

I’ve been seeing stuttering on larger files, either using the Plex app or Infuse, and I’m fairly certain the Synology is the weak link. Network performance in the house has pretty solid, though admittedly I could stand to test it more thoroughly. I’ve been looking at moving my library to a standalone system. I’ve been looking at the Beelink ME Mini (which happens to be on sale!). What I don’t know is the best way to build this out.

I don’t want to have to buy all 6 SSDs (ar at least 6x4TB ones!) at once, so I’d be looking at either a stock Linux (Ubuntu or Rocky) install w/ I guess a BTRFS pool for the SSDs (I’m guessing I can use the eMMC for OS depending on how big the install is - that or use the SSD in slot 4). Alternatively, i could possibly set up TruNAS w/ the Plex pp to manage the storage.

As for populating the media, I plan to keep the Synology as the central repo of my data. I have it replicating to another NAS at my dad’s house, with movies/music/tv replicating using Syncthing. I plan to also use Syncthing to populate the Beelink.

Anyway, please poke holes in this plan and/or suggest a better one. My main goals are to get the media I’m streaming off spinning disk w/ minimal power draw (didn’t mention that above) in a way that I can expand storage as necessary to accommodate the media library. Nothing’s purchased yet, so I’m not married to the hardware. I would ideally like to convert the library to h.265 or even AV1 if I can make it work.

ETA: For clarity: I’m not transcoding AFAIK. My Shield mounts the Synology over SMB and mostly works fine, until I try to play anything 4k - then I get stuttering. On the surface, this sounded like a network issue, but I can’t find a problem w/ the LAN. My thought was to move the PMS to a single location w/ local storage, and use the Synology just as an archive.

ETA2: FWIW, I have not expanded the memory on the Synology or installed any cache drives.