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 😅
My first real NAS was a Synology 920+, which I’m still using after several years. I knew nothing about NAS’, and it’s been amazing!
I’m self-hosting numerous applications via docker; have replaced quite a few paid services (google drive, Evernote, etc.); and it’s already come in handy to retrieve deleted documents from my wife’s computer (several times!), which we back up to the NAS.
My only real suggestion is to go with as many bays as possible. Mine is a 4-bay, and I’ve already filled AND upgraded the capacity of several drives. I wish I had gone with 6 or 8 bays, but I really had no idea that my NAS would be this versatile.
I do also have an 4-bay external HDD enclosure, but it only serves to make local backups of my NAS. I see my NAS as the main hub, and place for ALL of my data, so external drives are either feeding data to my NAS or storing backups.