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 😅

  • poVoqEnglish
    10•10 months ago
    1. Yes, but NTFS is a bad filesystem, so I would format it anyways.
    2. What are docker drives? Docker works on any normal Linux distro. Some commercial NAS are *BSD based though and there you need to use some ugly workarounds.
    3. Usually the fans make the most noise as NAS cases are optimized for heavy drive use and thus use a lot of ventilation. If you are a typical home user you might be better off repurposing a small form factor quiet media PC, but look for one that can fit the drives you want.
    4. Same as a regular PC. If the NAS is using standard software raid or btrfs/zfs then yes, with hardware raid no (avoid!).
    5. There are many different ways with different pro and cons. It really depends on what you want.