Thinking about setting up a nas to replace my current Emby.

[twiggy2cents 2]

I currently live life on the wild side and have all my stuff saved on one hard drive on a Linux server. The server runs fine and is new enough for Intel hw accel and low power usage. The only problem is that it’s a dell oem and doesn’t have room for more drives, cable or storage wise.  
 

I was thinking about doing the nas route and am looking for recommendations there’s two paths I could go. Keep the server going and use nfs or smb to save the files remotely or run Emby on the same nas. That’s the only server program I run.  So is there any recommendations for a path to go?

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

1 hour ago, twiggy2cents said:

I currently live life on the wild side and have all my stuff saved on one hard drive on a Linux server. The server runs fine and is new enough for Intel hw accel and low power usage. The only problem is that it’s a dell oem and doesn’t have room for more drives, cable or storage wise.  
 

I was thinking about doing the nas route and am looking for recommendations there’s two paths I could go. Keep the server going and use nfs or smb to save the files remotely or run Emby on the same nas. That’s the only server program I run.  So is there any recommendations for a path to go?

Does your current computer have available USB ports. If so you can add USB drives up to whatever limit your computer supports. 
Admittedly using Linux is not exactly like Windows (which is what I use) but it does. mostly, support the same drives and storage methods. 
I currently have something like 13 USB hard drives ranging from 4 tb to 12 tb  and they all work nearly perfectly all the time. 

I know that some people see USB drives as being too slow but I have never seen any effect from this. The actual drive speed or interface speed is unimportant for your media as streaming video is very low in stress for your drives. It is the Emby core and the OS itself where speed matters. 

Also your server should run nothing but Emby and whatever support programs are essential. No other programs should ever run on your server on a day to day basis. 

[twiggy2cents 2]

10 hours ago, Gilgamesh_48 said:

Does your current computer have available USB ports. If so you can add USB drives up to whatever limit your computer supports. 
Admittedly using Linux is not exactly like Windows (which is what I use) but it does. mostly, support the same drives and storage methods. 
I currently have something like 13 USB hard drives ranging from 4 tb to 12 tb  and they all work nearly perfectly all the time. 

I know that some people see USB drives as being too slow but I have never seen any effect from this. The actual drive speed or interface speed is unimportant for your media as streaming video is very low in stress for your drives. It is the Emby core and the OS itself where speed matters. 

Also your server should run nothing but Emby and whatever support programs are essential. No other programs should ever run on your server on a day to day basis. 

I don’t want to go the usb route but after thinking about it I think I’ll see if I could put a sata card and power splitters in the machine. Currently I have two drives in a 3d printed Mount inside, I would have to get creative to try and Mount more. 
 

ideally I would like to have 3 drives to run raid 5.  I would only need to fit one more drive in the case. 

[ebr 16169]

25 minutes ago, twiggy2cents said:

I’ll see if I could put a sata card and power splitters in the machine

Hi.  That was going to be my suggestion because your PC is probably more capable than most NAS systems.

[Neminem 1518]

I have used 1 of these for years with a NUC.

Amazon.com: QNAP TR-004 4 Bay USB Type-C Direct Attached Storage (DAS) with hardware RAID (Diskless) : Electronics

Ha ha there is a black Friday deal on that 1 now

before moving to a full size tower with space for 12 drives and unRaid as OS.

Edited November 24, 2025 by Neminem
Adding

[mtrow28 2]

I've had a Synology NAS for around 8 years, and was using the Synology Video Station. I switched to Emby on the NAS around 6 months ago bc Synology got rid of Video Station. It ran OK for my use generally, but there were time it seemed slower than I expected. I started to look into upgrading to a newer Synology, and discovered that Synology is disabling hardware transcoding. Mine doesn't currently do that, but the whole purpose of upgrading is gain improvement. Why invest in a new NAS to not get new features? So, I had an Intel NUC with a 10th gen CPU lying around. Upgraded it to Windows 11 Pro, installed Emby, and now just run the NAS as storage. I have noticed a significant improvement in performance. So, my advice would be to not run Emby server on a NAS. If you need storage, us a NAS, run Emby on a separate machine. Or if you can swing it, find a device with good hardware that can accommodate expandable storage. One other note, I will respectfully disagree with @Gilgamesh_48 on whether you should run other programs on your Emby server. This will be entirely hardware dependent, the better hardware you have, the more you can do. I personally run a VM on the previously mentioned NUC that hosts HomeAssistant. It uses two cores and 4GB of the 16GB installed RAM. Emby runs on the host OS. The system runs flawlessly. 

[Luke 42077]

@FrostBytemight be able to recommend a Synology model.

[FrostByte 5392]

My 2c

If looking at a 2025 Synology DS model and hardware transcoding is something you need then stay clear of the Ryzen models and get one with an Intel processor.  As far as I've seen hardware transcoding still works with Emby on newer models with gpu and DSM 7.3.  That would limit you to a DS225+ or DS425+. 

However, even if you get a model with a gpu Synology is still using the older J4125 and have been using them for several years now.  If needing to transcode a lot of bigger 4K movies, you might consider using the NAS for storage only like suggested above and getting something else which can transcode faster to run Emby server.  Or, maybe a different brand of NAS.  Qnap has some pretty good hardware specs.

I don't use transcoding at all so went with a bigger Ryzen unit (old DS1821+ with added memory) which allows expansion and runs Emby server just fine for my needs.  I don't believe the new DS225+ or DS425+ have expansion ability.  One of the biggest mistakes I made with my first NAS was knowing exactly how many drives and how big of drives I needed.  I also like DSM much more than the others NAS OS's.  I'm very happy with my setup and speed and throughput is never an issue for me.

I also use my NAS for Surveillance Center for my many IP cameras and don't notice any detriment to running it and Emby sever on the same device.

 

[cptlores 40]

https://www.xda-developers.com/never-going-back-to-synology/

In short, Synology is great if you want a turnkey solution and don't care about the price and walled garden solutions.

[Q-Droid 989]

On 11/24/2025 at 7:54 AM, twiggy2cents said:

I don’t want to go the usb route but after thinking about it I think I’ll see if I could put a sata card and power splitters in the machine. Currently I have two drives in a 3d printed Mount inside, I would have to get creative to try and Mount more. 
 

ideally I would like to have 3 drives to run raid 5.  I would only need to fit one more drive in the case. 

You didn't share any specs for your current machine but if you're considering a SATA card for expansion then you could get another PC case with room for more HDDs at a fraction of the cost of a NAS. Might also need a PSU. Transplant the components and you get to keep the same machine, OS and software without much hassle.

If your current Emby server is handling things well for you then you'll find that even a lateral move to run the same on a NAS can be pricey.

[twiggy2cents 2]

10 minutes ago, Q-Droid said:

You didn't share any specs for your current machine but if you're considering a SATA card for expansion then you could get another PC case with room for more HDDs at a fraction of the cost of a NAS. Might also need a PSU. Transplant the components and you get to keep the same machine, OS and software without much hassle.

If your current Emby server is handling things well for you then you'll find that even a lateral move to run the same on a NAS can be pricey.

I thought I did but either way it is a Dell office computer.  Power wise it is both energy efficient and has plenty of grunt for emby.  The down side is that it is a dell and as such they made multiple aspects of it proprietary for no reason.  Mainly the motherboard and PSU,  to go to another form factor I would basically have to get a new computer rather than transplant.  I am currently using a sata SSD as my boot drive.  The motherboard has a NVME slot, if I migrated over to that it would free up a total of 3 sata slots and would allow me Raid 5.  Also using a raid calculator and using 16tb drives it says rebuild time would be 1-2 weeks!  Thats insane though it is better than losing data.  

 

I used to keep my videos on a WD passport which started getting some bad blocks and as such I have multiple videos that have bad sections in the playback(usually manifesting as pixelated scenes).  I used to not put priority on my stored media but I've had it so long that I dont have most of the physical media anymore and I would hate to lose my investment over the years.

[XAFAfterShock 0]

Alright, I had a whole entire page typed up of my previous scenario but the forum keeps spitting out the 500 error page so The TLDR is don't waste your time or money on an off the shelf nas for media. I build a dirt cheap pc with a b550 moboe, ryzen 8 core cpu, 16GB of ddr4, ryzen 3700x cpu and a cheap 1060 GPU. I have a 4 bay synology nas that I WAS running emby on and for playing it was fine for 6 movies streams UNLESS any movie had to be transcoded then it was game over for the rest of the streams including even accessing the web interface. So I guess it depends on your use case, do any of your movies require transcoding for playback? If not then I could say a nas would probably be ok but if your have to transcode movies then I would consider building a cheap pc. you could build far cheaper than mine and outperform any off the shelf nas and the other good part is emby performs very well on windows, linux and truenas. I do still use my nas for backups and file sharing though so it's not totally useless.

[dropshadow 12]

https://www.ebay.com/itm/297117484608?_skw=supermicro+AOC-S3008L-L8i&epid=4047830240&itmmeta=01KB1W54N6T0KSH6GDR4X9AFFB&hash=item452d950640:g:FzgAAOSwomVmriDD&itmprp=enc%3AAQAKAAAA8FkggFvd1GGDu0w3yXCmi1fFQgkX4sdIWDvASsTeuTHGrDJnBkCXDVTIohoo4%2BreyWgPsqhO4JIw7%2FRDbTj%2FXi6fN1%2B2y324EBocgP%2BEv7pSNqfnBYKiQq50OrtWZABQc6gHJrWQF5gmARTs9VtwvfeearAVmAc9IAXX2kAeY67NZeKiReXCCdvzq4L1euVC%2BDs45AomgZwO%2FI3cZMO5cFfe%2Btoqhf1SFwHtVd2yQbm7qftjr%2BfeRmCX9hBHCX4FKgQqZqfqagkYwg%2BGhwINTFHtkLzssHi9P9ysXJkhpOx54TjD%2B1bEtwxSD%2FV9Y1WO1g%3D%3D|tkp%3ABFBM5sqUvNhm

ive seen this card + cables as low as $40 on ebay.

Edited November 27, 2025 by dropshadow