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 😅

  • JJLinuxEnglish
    2•4 months ago

    I guess I misspoke. It became insufficient for me rather quickly. When I started to find new platforms that would allow me to replace the data-hogs out there by self-hosting, any of those devices would have trouble keeping up. I went the so-called “overkill” route and made sure what I built could handle at least double my needs in terms of power, performance and storage capacity. After all this time I have yet to see my processor reach over 20% utilization and my RAM hasn’t hit 25% even once. At the end of the day, we all need to make our own choices. I’m actually glad that your synology has worked so good for you, seriously. After all, it is an investment.

    • kingthrillgoreEnglish
      2•4 months ago

      For what its worth, I think building a NAS has a few benefits, one being Native Level ZFS support if you use FreeNAS. Synology has gone in a different direction with btrfs and LVM, and I wish they would just stick with ZFS in User Space instead. Synology has managed to do a lot in their consumer lineup, they’ve even ditched ARM for x86 so they can offer Docker/LXC which is a big win, even if its not as performant as my own Proxmox stack off consumer hardware. That said, use what you feel comfortable with.

      • JJLinuxEnglish
        1•4 months ago

        That’s the beauty of self-hosting, choice. This must be one of the very few subjects in which we can disagree on something, and it’s still always good advise regardless of the choice.