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 😅

  • MahnaMahna@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    8 months ago

    Appreciate it! I’ll play around with the configuration and see what works. Initially I had a really fun (/s) time with permissions on folders that were accessed by multiple containers (could write to one folder but not read it with Plex, for example) so I’m going to phase it in incrementally, hopefully without breaking my current setup.

    • TheLordlessBard@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      8 months ago

      I do the wrong thing and chmod 777 all my media folders. If someone is that far into my network I’m probably screwed anyways