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52
Beginner looking for NAS advice (kbin.social)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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 πŸ˜…

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (5 children)

@Kaldo
Syno DS224+. Good bang vs. buck. Decent speed, decent features (iGPU, Docker, VMs).
My only gripe(s): only 2 USB ports, no built-in 2.5 GbE (possible via USB and 3rd party driver) and Synology's limited list of "approved" HDDs.

  1. Yes. If your HDD is formatted as NTFS or exFAT, no reformat _should_ be necessary.
  2. What do you mean by docker drives?
  3. Mainly the drives.
  4. My DS216+II runs 24/7 for 7 years now without hiccup (but, obvisously, YMMV). DSM supports drive migration.
[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

[email protected]
Sorry, with 'docker drives' I meant 'docker volumes or bind mounts'. I dont have a lot of experience with it yet so I'm not sure if I'm going to run into problems by mapping them directly to a NAS, or if I should have local copies of data and then rsync / syncthing them into the NAS. I heard you can theoretically even run docker on the NAS but not sure if that's a good idea in terms of its longevity or performance.

Is the list of "approved HDDs" just a marketing/support thing or does it actually affect performance?

Thanks for the answers! The DS2xx series looks like something I could start with. DS223 is a bit cheaper and has 3 USB ports so that could be useful, I'd guess I don't need to focus on performance since it's mostly just for personal data storage and not some intensive professional work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I dont have a lot of experience with it yet so I’m not sure if I’m going to run into problems by mapping them directly to a NAS, or if I should have local copies of data and then rsync / syncthing them into the NAS.

I don't know Synology specifically but you can generally NFS mount from the NAS to a local folder and mount that as a volume in Docker. I do it all the time - works fine except sometimes for databases which prefer local filesystems (locking files over NFS is complex).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

@Kaldo It's a support thing. Maybe even consider Syno's "own" HAT3300 HDDs. 4TB has an ok price, at least where I live.

You can run Docker on a Syno NAS via DSMs Container Manager package perfectly fine, as I do.

Keep in mind, the DS233 has an ARM CPU with less "grunt" vs. the 224+'s Intel CPU and can not be expanded beyond the soldered-on 2 GB RAM.
But, while it has been a backup device/test mule for years now, I used to run Docker containers on the DS216+II even with a meager 1 GB of RAM.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Could be a regional thing but Synology HDDs are around 30% more expensive than 'normal' WD/Seagate/Toshiba that I'm seeing at first glance. Maybe it does make it up for quality and longevity but afaik HDDs are pretty durable if they are maintained well, and I imagine them being in RAID1 should be good enough security measure?

Considering the price of the diskstation itself it's all quickly adding up to a price of a standalone PC so i'm trying to keep it simple since it's for a relatively low performance environment.

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