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Comment by edem | Hacker News Reader

I have a DS 923+. These extremely old softwares you mentioned were always weird to me but everything worked fine so far. What I'm not happy about is the vendor lock in, and the abysmal virtualization / transcoding performance. I want a NAS that comes with a similar ease of use as the DSM, but can double down as a __very lightweight__ virtualization platform for my local test deployments and as a media PC that I can rely on. What would you suggest?

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I'd suggest separate systems for NAS and media serving.

I've a Ryzen Embedded system with lost of RAM as my NAS box and a small Intel N-series based system as my Plex server that pulls media off the NAS box.

Yeah but these days you can easily have one system with 10 - 20 cores so you should be able to handle both workloads very well.

You can, but for media serving and transcoding you ideally want Intel Quick Sync, and it's simpler to have separate systems for your Quick Sync system and your "many cores" system.

Both of the CPUs you mention are low-power I don't think this a problem for slightly meatier processors unless you need the GPU or Quick Sync for multiple purposes?

Sure, you can get a meaty recent-gen Intel processor and get Quick Sync and plenty of cores, it just gives you awkward dependencies - you then a) can't get a non-Intel-based system without losing Quick Sync even if they're better value/performance/performance-per-watt and b) you can't upgrade your transcoding CPU without doing a whole new build of your meaty system, which is high-cost if you've got an especially meaty system.

(You might want to upgrade your transcoding box to a newer generation processor that supports, say, AV1 encoding.)

And FWIW my Ryzen Embedded system isn't especially low-power by design, it was just the most accessible way of getting ECC memory for me.

What does Quick Sync do? I'm new to this.

It decodes and encodes video streams with very low power draw and CPU load, so you can transcode media in realtime if your player device doesn't support the media format in question or you have bandwidth limits out-of-home.

Can do the same with various GPUs, but Quick Sync tends to be the lowest-power and most well-supported at the software level.

How about miniPC + USB x bay enclosure? I'm thinking about it. Have 4 Synology NAS mostly as long offline storage. No problems with them in this role so far.

Truenas scale?

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