I have a Synology DS220+ NAS with two 12TB HDDs installed. For a year or so, it’s been my primary homelab system. It also holds my Time Machine and PC backups, all of my media (TV / Movies), as well as my photos. I run Plex and Photoprism to manage those last two things.

I recently purchased a Beelink Mini PC and moved over Home Assistant, my *arr stack, my SABnzbd/DelugeVPN stack, and all of my toolkit programs like PiHole and Metube.

Does it make sense to move Plex and Photoprism over to my slightly more powerful Mini PC, and rely on Network streaming? Does that slow things down in any significant way? Or, should I keep those programs on the device that’s actually directly connected to the Media/Photos drives, knowing that device is a little less efficient?

To be honest, Plex works “fine” on the NAS. Switching it to the Mini PC would be for organization’s sake more than anything, so if the result would be “basically the same”, then I would definitely choose to bring it to the Mini PC.