1. Yes, but NTFS is a bad filesystem, so I would format it anyways.
2. What are docker drives? Docker works on any normal Linux distro. Some commercial NAS are *BSD based though and there you need to use some ugly workarounds.
3. Usually the fans make the most noise as NAS cases are optimized for heavy drive use and thus use a lot of ventilation. If you are a typical home user you might be better off repurposing a small form factor quiet media PC, but look for one that can fit the drives you want.
4. Same as a regular PC. If the NAS is using standard software raid or btrfs/zfs then yes, with hardware raid no (avoid!).
5. There are many different ways with different pro and cons. It really depends on what you want.

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

[Thread #553 for this sub, first seen 28th Feb 2024, 04:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Synology or QNAP will do the trick. However, once you get into the self-hosted rabbit hole, they'll become insufficient pretty quickly. My suggestion it's to start with a self-built right with a Ryzen 5 or 7, enough RAM (16GB should suffice at first) and take it from there. That way you have flexibility in terms of what hardware (disks, ram, processor, board, power supply, cooling, etc) and its usually very cost effective in terms of bang-for-the-buck. You can then test OMV, or Ubuntu server, or TrueNAS or anything else, and find your favorite. There are plenty of cases that can meet those needs without breaking the bank.

First things first: Synology as a beginner NAS is perfect! It’s what I recommend to everyone that is getting started out. So good move there.

I think you should get a four-bay NAS. You don’t have to put four drives in it; you can put two drives in it and have an upgrade path for later. Plus the drives are far easier to install and remove. The processor will also be better in a four-bay NAS, which will give you more options if you want to play around with a docker container or run a VM.

To answer your questions:

1. If the NAS you choose has a USB port on it, you will be able to connect things like external hard drives, thumb drives, etc. NASes with USB3 connectors support USB 3 drives. Just be sure to use a file system that is not proprietary. So NTFS is out, but exFat is fine.
2. I have connected to volumes on the NAS and have connected the NAS to other volumes without issues. It will work fine.
3. I had two NASes sitting right next to my head in my office at ear level — probably the worst case scenario for noise. I barely noticed them. I could hear them crunching away during backups, but it wasn’t bad. I never heard a fan running — just the internal drives making their read/write noises.
4. The drives fail before the NASes do. Synology had some issues with bult-in power supplies going bad after a few years. Their modern NASes now have plugs with a power brick on the cable, which I assume was in response to this issue. It’s a lot less expensive to replace a power cable than a whole NAS! But beyond that one issue (which affected one NAS of mine), the NASes I’ve been using have lasted for … oh, 8 years now.
5. There are many choices for syncing data with your synology NAS. They provide Synology Drive, which gives you a local drop-box-like folder syncing option. They support rsync, and they provide HyperBackup, which is a block-level backup utility. You can choose a Synology shared drive as the destination for a Time Machine backup on a Mac. (I assume you can do this with Windows’ backup solution, but I’ve never personally used it.)

I didn't see this mentioned so apologies if this is a duplicate, but keep in mind that for your *arr stack you will run into issues if you try to keep the config files on the NAS instead of stored locally to the server they run on. Radarr and Sonarr both use sqlite which does NOT like networked file storage due to the way it handles locking files. You can store the media that they handle on your new NAS just fine though!

whats the life expectancy of a NAS? if it dies, can I just plug the drives into a new one?

Others have said that the drives are the weak point here - the NAS itself should last quite a while. But to address your second question - "maybe" (assuming you meant "and keep the data on them"). It will depend a lot on how the RAID on the NAS works. If it's just a Linux md RAID then you could probably pop them into a new Linux system and get them to mount (there will be issues of "drive order" you will need to deal with). Again if it's using standard zfs or BTRFS raid-like filesystems you would be fine. If the NAS has its own RAID or hardware RAID then likely not.

@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.

My first real NAS was a Synology 920+, which I'm still using after several years. I knew nothing about NAS', and it's been amazing!

I'm self-hosting numerous applications via docker; have replaced quite a few paid services (google drive, Evernote, etc.); and it's already come in handy to retrieve deleted documents from my wife's computer (several times!), which we back up to the NAS.

My only real suggestion is to go with as many bays as possible. Mine is a 4-bay, and I've already filled AND upgraded the capacity of several drives. I wish I had gone with 6 or 8 bays, but I really had no idea that my NAS would be this versatile.

I do also have an 4-bay external HDD enclosure, but it only serves to make local backups of my NAS. I see my NAS as the main hub, and place for ALL of my data, so external drives are either feeding data to my NAS or storing backups.

1. I connect HDDs and even an action camera to the USB port when I need to make backups of my NAS, or to copy data into my NAS. I haven't needed to reformat anything just to work with the NAS.
2. my docker use is pretty basic: rss aggregator, podcast storage, bookmark storage, etc.
3. Drives don't make any noise, other than the typical "HDD read/write" noise that you'd get from a spinning HDD. The fan can be adjusted to different levels, and rarely do I ever notice them.
4. I expect any NAS to last as long as a typical desktop computer: at least 10 years. Drives can be swapped out and replaced when needed, but this is far easier to do the more bays you have, since you'll have redundancy in at least one other drive. Theoretically, I can lose an entire drive and not lose any data. In fact, even upgrading a drive is very seamless, and the data gets rebuilt into the new drive. Pretty cool stuff.
5. I don't use syncthing. On my computers, I'll sync/backup local files to the NAS using Synology drive. On my phone, I have Synology Photos backing up photos and videos, and Synology Drive backing up my "documents" folder. I do also use SMBSync2 (Android) to copy music files from my NAS to my phone, so I can listen offline.

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/