Old TS-251+ Needs an upgrade. What should i upgrade to?

English
1

Ive had this NAS for over 4 years now and it is still working strong and i will keep it as an external storage for the new one.
NAS is mainly a PLEX server with 2 18TB drives recently upgraded from 2 6TB drives. At the time i only had 1G internet but now it has been upgraded to 10G but the NAS is not capable of these speeds and i dont want to go the Wi-Fi route i rather have an internal card and the NAS be hardwired.

I am looking for a 4HD model that can mainly do what the 251+ did for PLEX meaning the decoding and such. I pretty much stay in the 720p and 1080p rarely rip or download anything 4k or 8k with the exception of the whole Star Wars collection and of course the John Wick movies that are better in 4k lol
What will be the best suitable candidate to upgrade to?

Requirements:
2.5G or 10G capable hardwired, not WiFi
onboard decoding for movies
4 HD slots
Up-gradable MEM
*4k and 8k is not that important to me as i rather have quantity than quality in most movies and series. But i am sure upgrading will have some of that.

Yes i have seen the spreadsheet that plex has for the best NAS for plex but i have to say it is confusing as hell.

2

Are you going to add a video card?

3

If your internet is 10G…why does the NAS have to be ugraded? (or are you mixing internet and network up?)

Cheapest NAS with Plex capable iGPU and 2.5GbE would be the TS-462

4

Well it doesnt have to be upgraded perse but i want something that can handle faster speed as the 251 is only 1000mbps and the only way to upgrade to get it to 2.5GbE will be with a USB wifi dongle and i want to be able to hardwire it to the network instead of WiFi.
And i also want to upgrade so i can add more storage on the same NAS instead of adding external storage. I am going to still use the 251 to run other things that i didnt want to run before because i wanted it to solely be a PLEX server. My daughters and son live far from me and the grandkids so they stream a lot from me so i want to take advantage of the upgrade with fiber.
I know i can add bigger HD to it and i already did but like i said before the 251 will be used for other things and again the new NAS will be my plex server and will also have home assistant moved to it as well as being the point of backup for my computers and phones including the grandkids phones and my kids.
The main reason to upgrade is to have more space and speed as well as being able to run other things i have been running in the cloud.

5

Make sure you run Plex in a docker when external access is done…or at least use a non standard port forward

1 Like