Synology’s 2025 refresh brought the DS225+ and DS425+ with the familiar Intel Celeron J4125, but it also quietly removed the kernel graphics driver support that Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby use for hardware transcoding of H.264 and HEVC. This guide explains what changed, why it matters for real-world streaming, and how you can restore GPU-accelerated transcoding on these models using an unofficial SSH method shared by the community. If you rely on your NAS to reshape 4K or high bitrate files for phones, tablets, hotel TVs, or limited connections, this walkthrough will help you get that efficiency back.
At this point, I’d say build your own if you are wanting anything more than basic file sharing.
Lots of resources out there and even NAS style cases to make it basically the same as any off the shelf NAS.
Xenology has been mentioned here, but I haven’t used it
FreeNAS is good, but I haven’t used it in years.
OpenMediaVault is supposed to be good, but again I haven’t used it.
Unraid is good and has super easy support for docker. I primarily use this because of its ability to use different disk sizes for the array and does what is the equivalent of software RAID. It’s not the fastest thing on the market, but for my use case (primarily Plex/Jellyfin) I don’t need the fastest reads or writes. It supports hardware passthrough for VMs or to docker containers so they can take advantage of hardware for acceleration. It also runs off a flash stick, so I don’t waste any disks on the OS.