Best NAS for Jellyfin: Read This Before You Buy One

Here’s the honest answer, even though it makes for a worse listicle: most people searching for the best NAS for Jellyfin shouldn’t buy a NAS at all. A consumer NAS is, mechanically, a weak computer bolted to some drive bays, sold at a premium because the drive bays are the product. Jellyfin doesn’t care about drive bays. It cares about one thing — whether the CPU can transcode video your devices can’t play natively — and on that measure a cheap mini PC beats almost every NAS at its price.

I run my own Jellyfin server on exactly that pattern: an Intel N100 mini PC (16GB/512GB, about £139 when I bought it) with a 4TB WD Red Plus for the library (~£89). Measured at the wall it idles at 6 W and sits around 11 W streaming 1080p direct play — roughly £15 a year at 27p/kWh. A NAS only earns its place when you genuinely need multi-drive redundancy: a library too big or too precious for one disk. If that’s you, this guide will point you at the right ones. If it isn’t, the mini PC guide will save you a couple of hundred pounds.

The one spec that actually matters

If you take a single thing from this page, take this: buy a NAS with an Intel CPU that has an integrated GPU, because that’s where Quick Sync lives — Intel’s hardware video engine that lets a feeble Celeron or N-series chip transcode 4K HEVC without breaking a sweat. Never buy an ARM NAS for Jellyfin. ARM models (most of the cheap Synology and budget two-bay boxes) can serve files happily, but ask them to transcode and they’ll choke on a single 1080p stream. I’ve covered why in detail in the hardware transcoding guide; the short version is that one iGPU is worth more than four extra ARM cores.

The trap to watch in 2026 is that this is getting harder, not easier, on the biggest brand. Synology’s newer Plus models in the DS923+ and DS925+ class moved to AMD Ryzen embedded chips with no integrated GPU at all — fine for business file serving, a genuine downgrade for Jellyfin. The older Intel-based Plus models (DS423+, DS224+, with the Celeron J4125) kept Quick Sync. So with Synology specifically you cannot assume newer means better for media; check the CPU line on the spec sheet before anything else.

NAS models that get the iGPU right

I haven’t bench-tested every box below — my own server is the mini PC above — so treat these as the shortlist that survives the iGPU test, not a ranked teardown. All of them run Intel chips with Quick Sync, which is the qualifying bar.

UGREEN NASync DXP2800 / DXP4800

The newest serious entrant. The two-bay DXP2800 runs the same Intel N100 as my mini PC, which means identical transcoding chops, for roughly £250–£300; the four-bay DXP4800 steps up to a Pentium Gold 8505 class chip around £400–£450. Hardware per pound is the best in this list. The trade-off is software maturity — UGOS is young, and you’re trusting a newcomer with your data (more on that below).

Synology DS423+ (or DS224+ for two bays)

The safe choice, with caveats. DSM is the most polished NAS operating system there is, the Celeron J4125 has a working iGPU (the two-bay DS224+ shares it), and the four-bay DS423+ sits around £450. You pay the Synology tax — weaker hardware than UGREEN at the same price, and increasingly pushy drive-compatibility lists — but the software has a decade of polish the others can’t match. Just don’t accidentally buy the iGPU-less newer siblings.

TerraMaster F4-424

A four-bay F4-424 with an Intel N95 (the F4-424 Pro upgrades to an i3-N305) for around £330–£380. TerraMaster’s TOS software is the weakest of the bunch, but the F4-424 has a quiet superpower: it boots happily from its own internal drive, so a lot of owners simply wipe TOS and install plain Debian or TrueNAS, turning it into honest commodity hardware in a tidy four-bay case. If you’re comfortable doing that, it’s arguably the best value here.

QNAP TS-464

QNAP has stayed loyal to Intel up and down the range, and the TS-464 (Celeron N5095/N5105, around £430–£480) is the usual pick. Strong hardware, PCIe expansion, proper iGPU. The hesitation is QTS itself: busier and less coherent than DSM, and QNAP’s security track record over the last few years means you should never expose one directly to the internet.

Running Jellyfin on each — the honest version

Whichever box you buy, you’ll run Jellyfin in Docker, and the job is the same everywhere: get the container running, then pass the iGPU through by mapping /dev/dri into the container so Quick Sync actually gets used. Miss that step and you’ll have bought an Intel NAS that transcodes like an ARM one.

• Synology — Container Manager is the friendliest Docker front-end in the business and there’s a decade of step-by-step guides. The wrinkle is DSM’s ageing kernel and Intel driver stack, which occasionally lags what Jellyfin’s tone-mapping wants. Mostly it just works.
• UGREEN — UGOS ships Docker and it works, but the UI is thin and you’ll end up SSH’d in writing compose files by hand sooner than on DSM. Documentation is improving but young.
• TerraMaster — TOS Docker support exists; the honest route, as above, is replacing TOS entirely and running the same stack you’d run on any Linux box.
• QNAP — Container Station is capable and mature, just fussier to navigate. The /dev/dri passthrough works the same way once you find the right toggles.

The pattern I’d actually buy: NAS for storage, mini PC for Jellyfin

Here’s the configuration this site genuinely recommends if you need redundancy: let the NAS do the one job it’s brilliant at — keeping your files safe across multiple drives — and put Jellyfin on a small Intel mini PC that mounts the library over NFS or SMB. The NAS never transcodes anything, so it doesn’t matter whether it has an iGPU, which opens up cheaper models and used bargains. The mini PC brings a newer, faster iGPU than any NAS at the price, and when it’s time to upgrade the server you replace a £139 box instead of a £450 one.

It also splits your failure domains: a botched Jellyfin update can’t touch the box holding your data, and storage maintenance doesn’t take your media server down. The wiring is one fstab line on the mini PC. If you’re starting from zero, the budget server build walks the whole thing end to end, and the mini PC round-up covers which head unit to pick.

What a four-bay NAS costs to run

Power is the cost nobody prices in. Four spinning 3.5-inch drives plus the board typically pull 25–35 W with the disks awake, and media-server workloads keep disks awake a lot. At 27p/kWh that’s roughly £60–£80 a year, every year — against about £15 for my measured 6 W mini PC build. Over a four-year life the electricity gap alone can exceed the price of the mini PC. Drive spin-down helps, but Jellyfin’s scheduled scans and any always-on container love to defeat it. Run your own numbers in the power cost calculator before deciding the bays are free.

How the options compare

So which should you buy?

If you’ve read this far and still want a single box: buy the UGREEN DXP4800 class for hardware value, the Synology DS423+ for software comfort, or the TerraMaster F4-424 if you plan to install your own OS — and whatever you choose, confirm the Intel iGPU on the spec sheet before checkout. If you mainly wanted a Jellyfin server and the NAS idea arrived with the search results, start with the main Jellyfin server guide instead — for one drive’s worth of media, the mini PC route is quieter, cheaper to buy, far cheaper to run, and a better transcoder. The bays are only worth paying for when you’d actually cry if a disk died.