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 😅

  • @dillydoggEnglish
    2•4 months ago

    I think this is great advice. You’ve made me realize that I’m entering a stage of my training that is notorious for lack of free time, so maybe I’ll leave the self build tinkering for another day. It is more important for me to get the local storage going sooner than later but I will plan on building a tinkering PC someday.

    • JJLinuxEnglish
      1•4 months ago

      I’m genuinely happy I could help. I wish you the best luck with this, and above all, have fun. It is a lot of fun (until my wife starts wanting me to do something the moment I set my mind to start playing with my server or network, 🤪). You evidently have your priorities straight, and that’s great to choose the best course of action for each step. Another hack, in case you’re interested, I got my disks shucked out of some WD external drives that I knew were actually WD Red (3 10TB drives) and I ended up saving about 150 dollars total. But know that of you choose to go this route, you’ll need to disable the 3v pins on each drive, either by covering them with some electric tape, or just remonif the pins altogether (which is what I did). Enjoy buddy.