Selfhosted

I went down the rabbit hole a while back, I have the space so I went with an old Dell R720 server rack with 24 cores/48 threads, and like 128 gigs of ram for 300 dollars off eBay.

I flashed the raid controller to IT mode using this guide

The perk of going this route is that I can run UnRaid which has an awesome web interface for creating docker containers and content servers.

At the same time you get the ability to add drives over time without having to rebuild your array. I started with a cache, parity, and storage. Over time I have added an additional parity drive and 6 more storage drives.

With this setup and similar you also can use SAS drives. Used helium filled enterprise drives are around 80 dollars for 10tb.

I run a plex server with mostly 4k content, game servers, Wordpress, pihole, media grabbers (aars), seedbox, home nas and countless other containers basically 24/7.

It works incredibly well especially for the price, but it is large. If you have space I highly recommend it. I run mine in an insulated crawlspace lol.

You already sound like you're down the rabbit hole! If I could restart I would probably do a DIY server instead of a synology NAS. It's just really satisfying how much stuff you can offload onto the NAS itself. And Synology are notorious for using weak components for that type of thing. Transcoding can be particularly weak depending on the model, which if you're wanting to host content with Jellyfin, may give you some regret. That said having a synology NAS and a NUC could be a great solution. Or you could just make a DIY with a jonsbo case that can handle most anything you can throw at it and be extensible when you go further down the rabbit hole. All things considered if I could redo it all, I would go this route.

Some advantages: can upgrade CPU, slot in GPU for transcoding and other types of work, upgrade ram, no hacks to use NVMEs as a volume, can probably find a board with native 10g networking to avoid using up a pci slot, more pci slots.

Disadvantages: easier to footgun, no shr raid but you seem set on raid 6 anyway.

In terms of performance and flexibility, building your own is better. Depends on what you want out of it.

If all you want is an easy to setup NAS with no bells and whistles, get a synology. If you want to build a server that also has a NAS, if you want to be in control of the software, build your own.

You don't even need server hardware. I used an older desktop computer with an HBA card. It's also less noisy and much smaller.

There are a few people saying that a synology NAS may not do everything you’d ever want, but there’s an underlying assumption there that you should run everything on a single device. There’s value in isolating functions to their dedicated device, especially when the alternative means a guaranteed compromise.

Buy a nas. You'll be up and running much quicker. Build a separate server instead. Look for low powered intel NUCs and run portainer or proxmox. Or both. Use rsync or nfs to backup relevant data to the bought nas and use Infrastructure as code/gitops to configure the NUC.

I have a Synology pre built. Self hosting on it is doable, but I found it very limiting because of all of the packages that don't exist for its custom distro. Eventually I got a new gaming PC and converted my old one to a most standard Linux distro because of this.

This was back before I knew anything about docker. You could probably get around some of the package limitations by using docker. In fact, I have done this. I am using rsnapshot in a container to backup my server because rsnapshot is not available on Synology.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 13 acronyms.

[Thread #147 for this sub, first seen 19th Sep 2023, 06:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I would go custom and use hardware that you can re-configure and re-use in the future. If you pick up a Synology now and wind up feeling restricted by it in 2 years, it might become useless e-waste. If you have anything laying around, put that to use while you're getting your feet wet - you probably don't know what hardware configurations you'll end up wanting in a year, and you don't want to underbuy/overbuy.

You can also test self-hosting without any real hardware by spinning up a VM and passing in "fake" hard-drives to it. Try setting up a RAID6 in this fashion and see what happens. After you've played around enough you can just export all your Docker data etc onto real hardware.

I haven't used any of the prebuilt things so I'm not sure how user-friendly they are compared to normal solutions, but I'd find it hard to believe that they offer anything truly unique in terms of being accessible for normies. Assuming you're going to be the only one taking care of the NAS administration, there's likely an accessible webUI for every public service you want to offer to your friends/family.

I ended up going with a synology Nas as i didn't need high performance CPU and wanted a turn key solution. For what you get hardware wise, its low value, but if you factor in software and support, it works out to OK value.

You mentioned your parents will be using this. What services are you hoping to host? Outside network access is another rabbit hole.

Check the hardware requirements of the services you plan the host, but from what ir sounds like, you would likely be better served with decent pc 8th gen Intel with the storage in a 4 bay NAS or internal to the PC.

I suggested 8th gen Intel as a min for video transcoding (if needed)

If you enjoy researching, tinkering and customizing everything exactly how you envision it then build a custom one. If you "just" want to use the thing and run some docker containers then buy a NAS. From what you wrote I think a NAS is what you are looking for, especially the low maintenance part. Just make sure it's not the most basic one, so it actually has the power to run what you need.

The one great thing about Synology NAS is that most things are right there in the UI or package center. You can just install them without researching 100 different alternatives, and configure them in the UI instead of config files. What's not there can be installed just like on a custom server, because it is just a regular server after all. You also get good customer support if something doesn't work, especially useful when you're not as knowledgeable in everything yet.

I went with a Synology and have been very happy with it. Easy to use, very nice GUI, yet quite powerful with the features provided.

From there I moved on to NUC. I used to host several things through Docker on the Synology but I’m now moving many of those things to the NUC.

I was using QNAPs NASes for more than 10 years. It was a great product, not anymore. Feature bloat took its toll. It can do a lot but do it badly. So if you go for prebuild avoid QNAP. Build your own.

If power usage and/or noise are concerns, I would steer clear of enterprise gear.

I started out with a Synology NAS, which died and took my data with it because of their proprietary software raid. I think you don't need to worry about that these days, but I haven't looked into it much. I haven't gone back to a pre built NAS since.

Currently, my production setup consists of a Dell R720xd that runs pretty much everything, and a Dell R710 that runs as a backup TrueNAS server. It's loud, sucks back about 550W, produces a ton of heat, and takes up a good deal of space when you add in the rack mount switch and ups. I just moved pretty far, and I decided to move my homelab to my dad's house instead of taking it with me.

My plan is to migrate to a more reasonable setup incrementally. I'm currently building a proxmox ve host out of my old gaming PC (ryzen 2700x + gtx1060). I added 2x 10TB drives, made a mirrored zfs pool, and I'm running an openmediavault VM to share it on the network. I have another VM for home assistant, another for matrix/jitsi/etherpad, another for jellyfin/arr stack/sabnzbd with the GPU passed through for transcoding, another for swag/paperless-ngx/immich, and a final one for the MASH Ansible playbook. And I have a small fanless AliExpress PC running pfsense as a router/gateway.

The "ideal" final setup is to basically build another machine to put TrueNAS onto that will replace my openmediavault setup. I'm aiming for total average power draw to be under 100W.

My suggestion given my experience with different hardware is to scrap together whatever you can for cheap, run proxmox with openmediavault, and build the VMs for services whose data you don't care much about first, then build a dedicated NAS running TrueNAS. The NAS doesn't have to be fancy. It doesn't need ECC ram. You could probably build a competent, compact NAS for about $400 without HDDs. Once you have the NAS, then build out services like NextCloud, immich, and paperless-ngx, where losing the data would suck. And then think about a backup solution for that data.