64GB RAM is overkill for Plex transcoding.

Yes, it’s probably overkill if you’re only thinking about transcoding, but you mentioned other services, so let’s break it down.

Plex transcoding doesn’t eat RAM the way people assume. The heavy lifting is done by the CPU or GPU, and RAM is mostly used for buffering – a few hundred MB per stream, even for 4K HDR. Unless you’re running 20+ simultaneous transcodes (unlikely on a NAS), 16GB is plenty. 32GB is bulletproof. 64GB is for running multiple VMs or memory-heavy containers.

Since you’re running other services, 64GB isn’t wasteful if you actually use it. But if those services are lightweight (Sonarr, Radarr, Home Assistant, a few Docker containers), you’ll likely never use more than 8-16GB. That’s money you could put toward a better Plex CPU or more storage.

So: overkill for transcoding, possibly useful for other stuff