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 😅

  • kratoz29English
    1•4 months ago

    I’m self-hosting numerous applications via docker; have replaced quite a few paid services (google drive, Evernote, etc.)

    What Evernote alternative are you self hosting?

    I’m looking for one myself, but it needs to have a top notch search engine and web capture.

    • @Showroom7561@lemmy.caEnglish
      0•4 months ago

      In all honestly, I migrated all my Evernote data to Synology Notes.

      I do still use Synology Notes, however, I’ve also made it a point to separate certain things like receipts (something I used Evernote for) to plain PDF files organized in a file folder structure for better data portability.

      Synology global search is pretty great, so it will read inside of PDF documents, and I haven’t had any issues with finding large amounts of data when needed.

      I do miss Evernote, but I got sick and tired of their constantly increasing prices and making their software worse. And I used Evernote from the very beginning… even got a shirt! But self-hosting, while adding a few extra hoops to jump through to get working, is the best thing ever.

      That’s the real issue I have with any note taking software is the data portability or lack of. Even Synology Notes will be a challenge to migrate away from (if I ever do), so anything that doesn’t need to go there gets put somewhere else! But Notes has been seamless to use and “just works” for my needs.