Which NAS for Jellyfin?

[Maka]

Hi all, not sure if this is in the right forum, but I wanted to ask about potentially getting a prebuilt NAS, primarily it would be used for Jellyfin, and I could see down the line as photo/cloud storage as I become comfortable with how it works. I had in mind $300, not including the cost of the drive(s).

I've been looking at 2 bay Synology NAS, they seem like nice little units that have a spot on my desk. The prices seem to vary quite a bit, so I'm not really sure what I should be looking at for my needs. Like I mentioned, it would be primarily be for streaming from Jellyfin, and kind of serve as another form of backup in addition to the external drives I already use for that purpose.

I dont have any 4k video. All the video I have is what I ripped from dvd's or blurays myself, it currently sits at about 1.25tb. Most movies and shows from the DVD's are 480p, and generally the blu rays I encode at 720p to save on space. The only videos I have kept at 1080p are usually the BBC David Attenborough nature series, and just a few of my wife and I's favorite movies, otherwise most of the blu rays I made into 720p .mkv files, I aim for a size of about 1gb to 1.5gb per movie, then of course there are exceptions for some films that are very long.

Currently, I have a raspberry pi with LibreElec plugged into the tv. Its been working great actually, but I was thinking it would be nice to stream media outside of my home network, and also I think Jellyfin would make it easier for my wife to stream from her phone or tablet while at home.

I haven actually set up Jellyfin yet though, I guess that would be a good first step to see how it like it, I was thinking of using a laptop of mine temporary to see how it could function in general.

If any had recommendations for a Synology NAS, that would be appreciated, or even another brand, I'm just in uncharted territory here.

Any recommendations are very much appreciated! And please do ask if I left any info out.

If all you just want is a nice convenient media Catalog system to view/listen to your content then any decent NAS will do just fine. eg I have an Asustor AS5202T (Lockerstor 2?) NAS. It has a low end Intel Celeron & I added some extra RAM for good measure. Been using it for Plex & later Jellyfin for years with no complaints. Advantage: uses little electricity & simple to install/administer Jellyfin server.

Synology charges much more for their NAS. Asustor, Terrabox etc charge less.

If, on the other hand, you want to do fancy transcoding etc etc then a full PC/Laptop/Rack Server is needed. These use considerably more electricity and require greater level of technical knowledge to install/configure/maintain.

I store my media in ready to consume format which does not require the heavy overhead of transcoding.

Hope this helps somebody