Ideal Hardware for Jellyfin

[HelpingAnt98]

The ideal hardware choice would be to install the Jellyfin server data onto an SSD. Most likely the reason the Synology was not great for you is because the OS is installed on HDDs only (unless you made an all-SSD build). That also means that all Docker containers will be installed on the HDDs too.

You could make your own PC or buy a pre-built one that you can make sure has an SSD for the core services and for Jellyfin to be installed on.
I've seen some people also go with an Intel NUC too, and those don't use much power.

If you still want to go with a NAS, I would recommend Unraid or Truenas Scale. Note that I wouldn't recommend Truenas Core as its support for Jellyfin is really bad since it's built with BSD.
You basically buy your computer parts and build the PC, then install either Unraid or Truenas Scale on it. You can choose to install Jellyfin on an SSD then.

If you're worried about power consumption (since you don't want to leave your gaming PC on 24/7), just make sure to get reasonable parts. You don't need a GPU for example if your CPU has an iGPU if you want HWA for Jellyfin, and having a GPU doing nothing still uses some watts at idle.

Thanks you for your quick reply, I have only HDDs in my NAS which truely could slow down the performance. I Think the main reason is the slow cpu/ no gpu so transcoding to my IPhone is pretty resource intensive or even too much for the NAS. I don't really want to upgrade my NAS for this usecase since it's doing it's purpose just fine. I'm thinking about a mini-pc to which I map my NAS as a Network Drive. Thats how im doing it right now on my gaming PC and it's working like a charm. I think i will look out for a prebuild mini-pc with power efficient parts. Thank you!

Pis are not recommended, as per the documentation. For your use case, a Mini PC running an intel chip with an iGPU seems the best bet, such as the NUC recommended above. Because there's probably thousands of options on what mini pc to get, your best bet is to refer to the hardware selection section of the docs and use that as a rule of thumb on what to get. Just remember to aim for an intel chip since the documentation lists encoding quality currently as

Encoder Quality: Intel > Nvidia > AMD > Apple

Other than that, just use common sense and don't make hasty purchases; research components properly and adjust accordingly to your budget and use case.

I have also read about Pis beeing bad for this use case. I Think a Mini PC is the way to go for me. If you have any recommendations for prebuild ones please let me know!
Thank you for your help!

I would recommend going for a intel minipc with n100 or similar cpu. They have powerful iGPUs and low power consumption.
You can fit 1x 4TB nvme SSD is most systems.

If you want more storage with HDDs I would recommend building a small system around an Asrock N100DC-ITX. Then you can have 2x Sata HDD + 1x m2 ssd.

That's also what im thinking about. Storage wouldn't be a problem here since I would just Map my NAS a Network Drive, this should do the porpuse just fine. I think a Mini PC with a rather small SSD would be enough to install OS and Jellyfin + some other Stuff. If you have any Prebuild mini pc recommendations please let me know.