I’m looking for advice on how to get started with a NAS, probably Synology since it’s beginner friendly and often well recommended. I’m thinking of a 2 bay case with 2x4TB HDDs in RAID1 setup. What do I have to look out for in a device to get the best bang for my bucks?
My use case:
I have various documents, software projects, family pictures, videos that I want to store on something more reliable than a bunch of internal/external HDDs or USB sticks. I have a full *arr stack and jellyfin but I want to move these to my “server” laptop and docker once NAS is setup, and then host the files on it. For projects I might want to self-host gitea down the line.
Some more specific questions:
- if I go with a 2 bay NAS case, can i also connect my old external drive to it as a separate drive, can they handle USB3 drives? Will it require reformatting since it was used on windows so far?
- are there any issues with connecting docker
drivesvolumes to a NAS? - noise issues - does the NAS itself make a noticeable amount of noise or is it just the drives?
- whats the life expectancy of a NAS? if it dies, can I just plug the drives into a new one?
- does syncthing work well with a NAS or is there a better way of syncing local files to the NAS for backup?
Sorry for the question dump, just wanted to cover as many possible issues as possible 😅
Synology or QNAP will do the trick. However, once you get into the self-hosted rabbit hole, they’ll become insufficient pretty quickly. My suggestion it’s to start with a self-built right with a Ryzen 5 or 7, enough RAM (16GB should suffice at first) and take it from there. That way you have flexibility in terms of what hardware (disks, ram, processor, board, power supply, cooling, etc) and its usually very cost effective in terms of bang-for-the-buck. You can then test OMV, or Ubuntu server, or TrueNAS or anything else, and find your favorite. There are plenty of cases that can meet those needs without breaking the bank.
Hmm, I bought a used laptop on which I wanted to tinker with linux and docker services, but I kinda wanted to separate the NAS into a separate advice to avoid the “all eggs in one basket” situation (also I can’t really connect that many hard drives to it unless I buy some separately charged USB disk hubs or something, if those exist and are any good?)
However I do see the merit in your suggestion considering some of the suggestions here are driving me into temptation to get a $500 NAS and that’s even without the drives… that’s practically more than what my desktop is worth atm.
That’s exactly the point. Forking over almost 500 bucks for a low profile but low end computer to put disks into, while making it easier for less technology “risk taking” people to achieve some self-hosting features, when adding about 100 to 150 more you can actually get over 4 times the power any of those things can give you, kind of looks like a huge waste of money to me. I made that mistake once. I outgrew my QNAP in less than a year, so I ended up passing it over to my sister since she doesn’t tinker at all and uses it exclusively for backing up her data, nothing else. I self-host nextcloud, bitwarden, have a cloudflare tunnel set up to avoid opening ports in my PFSense, I host my own Wireguard, AdguardHome, Bitwarden, Joplin, Home Assistant, 2 search engines (SearX and Whoogle), and many things more.