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 😅

  • WhiteHotaruEnglish
    1•9 months ago

    Hi! I was in your situation in January. I went for a used two bay Synology 720+ model, that came with 10GB RAM and a used WD Red 4 TB WD40EFRX.

    The main reason I switched to a NAS was an easy way to share our children’s photos with my SO. Synology is perfect for this, because the photos app has face recognition and can search through location data, which is coming in handy with 25K photos.

    Second thing I wanted to do on the NAS was the whole backup strategy of our laptops. At the moment we rely on cloud backups, but I wanted to change this to a solid 3-2-1 strategy. On top the cloud backup never really worked on my SOs laptop.

    I had no ambition with selfhosting, but am familiar with Linux. At the moment I have a paperless instance and jellyfish running. I plan to put some shows for the kids on it, my CD collection and am ripping my DVDs.

    Until now the process was very smooth. Paperless has some minor hiccups I could iron out, but the whole Synology infrastructure is really solid.

    I picked the 720+ because the perks of a 723+ seemed negligible to me. This page offers a good comparison: https://nascompares.com/guide/synology-ds720-vs-ds723-nas-which-should-you-choose/