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:

  1. 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?
  2. are there any issues with connecting docker drives volumes to a NAS?
  3. noise issues - does the NAS itself make a noticeable amount of noise or is it just the drives?
  4. whats the life expectancy of a NAS? if it dies, can I just plug the drives into a new one?
  5. 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 😅

  • KaldoOP
    2•4 months ago

    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.

    • JJLinuxEnglish
      1•4 months ago

      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.