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 drives volumes 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 😅
Synology or QNAP will do the trick. However, once you get into the self-hosted rabbit hole, they’ll become insufficient pretty quickly.
My suggestion it’s to start with a self-built right with a Ryzen 5 or 7, enough RAM (16GB should suffice at first) and take it from there. That way you have flexibility in terms of what hardware (disks, ram, processor, board, power supply, cooling, etc) and its usually very cost effective in terms of bang-for-the-buck.
You can then test OMV, or Ubuntu server, or TrueNAS or anything else, and find your favorite.
There are plenty of cases that can meet those needs without breaking the bank.
I disagree with this. I have managed to get by quite well with my 4-bay Synology for over five years. They still even provide updates for it. That said, most of the “work” is done on a server of its own accord, and not on the NAS. More than anything, this server will be getting an upgrade later this year with a newer workhorse from either Dell or Supermicro to better suit the needs of virtualization and LXC, and on-hardware AI with whatever consumer PCI cards I can get my hands on.
I don’t foresee a need to upgrade outside of disk replacements for storage for another few years, by that time it may be time for 10GigE at home and then, we can talk upgrade.
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.
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.
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.
Hmm, I bought a used laptop on which I wanted to tinker with linux and docker services, but I kinda wanted to separate the NAS into a separate advice to avoid the “all eggs in one basket” situation (also I can’t really connect that many hard drives to it unless I buy some separately charged USB disk hubs or something, if those exist and are any good?)
However I do see the merit in your suggestion considering some of the suggestions here are driving me into temptation to get a $500 NAS and that’s even without the drives… that’s practically more than what my desktop is worth atm.
That’s exactly the point. Forking over almost 500 bucks for a low profile but low end computer to put disks into, while making it easier for less technology “risk taking” people to achieve some self-hosting features, when adding about 100 to 150 more you can actually get over 4 times the power any of those things can give you, kind of looks like a huge waste of money to me.
I made that mistake once. I outgrew my QNAP in less than a year, so I ended up passing it over to my sister since she doesn’t tinker at all and uses it exclusively for backing up her data, nothing else.
I self-host nextcloud, bitwarden, have a cloudflare tunnel set up to avoid opening ports in my PFSense, I host my own Wireguard, AdguardHome, Bitwarden, Joplin, Home Assistant, 2 search engines (SearX and Whoogle), and many things more.
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Synology or QNAP will do the trick. However, once you get into the self-hosted rabbit hole, they’ll become insufficient pretty quickly. My suggestion it’s to start with a self-built right with a Ryzen 5 or 7, enough RAM (16GB should suffice at first) and take it from there. That way you have flexibility in terms of what hardware (disks, ram, processor, board, power supply, cooling, etc) and its usually very cost effective in terms of bang-for-the-buck. You can then test OMV, or Ubuntu server, or TrueNAS or anything else, and find your favorite. There are plenty of cases that can meet those needs without breaking the bank.
I disagree with this. I have managed to get by quite well with my 4-bay Synology for over five years. They still even provide updates for it. That said, most of the “work” is done on a server of its own accord, and not on the NAS. More than anything, this server will be getting an upgrade later this year with a newer workhorse from either Dell or Supermicro to better suit the needs of virtualization and LXC, and on-hardware AI with whatever consumer PCI cards I can get my hands on.
I don’t foresee a need to upgrade outside of disk replacements for storage for another few years, by that time it may be time for 10GigE at home and then, we can talk upgrade.
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.
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.
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.
Hmm, I bought a used laptop on which I wanted to tinker with linux and docker services, but I kinda wanted to separate the NAS into a separate advice to avoid the “all eggs in one basket” situation (also I can’t really connect that many hard drives to it unless I buy some separately charged USB disk hubs or something, if those exist and are any good?)
However I do see the merit in your suggestion considering some of the suggestions here are driving me into temptation to get a $500 NAS and that’s even without the drives… that’s practically more than what my desktop is worth atm.
That’s exactly the point. Forking over almost 500 bucks for a low profile but low end computer to put disks into, while making it easier for less technology “risk taking” people to achieve some self-hosting features, when adding about 100 to 150 more you can actually get over 4 times the power any of those things can give you, kind of looks like a huge waste of money to me. I made that mistake once. I outgrew my QNAP in less than a year, so I ended up passing it over to my sister since she doesn’t tinker at all and uses it exclusively for backing up her data, nothing else. I self-host nextcloud, bitwarden, have a cloudflare tunnel set up to avoid opening ports in my PFSense, I host my own Wireguard, AdguardHome, Bitwarden, Joplin, Home Assistant, 2 search engines (SearX and Whoogle), and many things more.
+1 for QNAP, mine is great
-1 because of Qlocker