this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
52 points (98.1% liked)

Selfhosted

39964 readers
528 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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˜…

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Maybe this is an incredibly dumb question, but I was actually doing research on a very similar question to the OP and I still don't really have a definitive answer.

I currently have a series of docker containers running Plex and the full *arr setup on the Linux drive of my PC. Because I dual boot my machine, I want to migrate my server to a NAS so I don't shut it down whenever I switch from Linux to Windows. I'm seeing that I could theoretically use a NAS just for the media storage and keep all the transcoding (ie all of the docker containers with sonarr, radarr etc) on the existing Linux drive. However, would the Plex container live on the NAS or the Linux drive? I'd assume the NAS...?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Not a dumb question at all! It can take some time to really wrap your head around this stuff

If you want Plex to be able to serve media all the time (even when your main PC is off or you're switching between your Linux and Windows installs) then you'd have to run it on the NAS. You may be able to keep the *arr stack on your Linux drive if you don't care about uptime, since these programs really only need to run when you need media files managed. That being said, you might find it more simple to manage if you migrate all your workloads to the NAS

I currently have Plex running as an "app" on my TrueNAS SCALE NAS, which is just what they call containers/deployments. It runs very well, and I was even able to pass though a GPU for transcoding

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

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 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