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 😅

  • @Showroom7561@lemmy.caEnglish
    1•8 months ago

    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.

    1. I connect HDDs and even an action camera to the USB port when I need to make backups of my NAS, or to copy data into my NAS. I haven’t needed to reformat anything just to work with the NAS.
    2. my docker use is pretty basic: rss aggregator, podcast storage, bookmark storage, etc.
    3. Drives don’t make any noise, other than the typical “HDD read/write” noise that you’d get from a spinning HDD. The fan can be adjusted to different levels, and rarely do I ever notice them.
    4. I expect any NAS to last as long as a typical desktop computer: at least 10 years. Drives can be swapped out and replaced when needed, but this is far easier to do the more bays you have, since you’ll have redundancy in at least one other drive. Theoretically, I can lose an entire drive and not lose any data. In fact, even upgrading a drive is very seamless, and the data gets rebuilt into the new drive. Pretty cool stuff.
    5. I don’t use syncthing. On my computers, I’ll sync/backup local files to the NAS using Synology drive. On my phone, I have Synology Photos backing up photos and videos, and Synology Drive backing up my “documents” folder. I do also use SMBSync2 (Android) to copy music files from my NAS to my phone, so I can listen offline.
    • kratoz29English
      1•8 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
        1•8 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.