So, I am thinking about getting myself a NAS to host mainly Immich and Plex. Got a couple of questions for the experienced folk;
- Is Synology the best/easiest way to start? If not, what are the closest alternatives?
- What OS should i go for? OMV, Synology’s OS, or UNRAID?
- Mainly gonna host Plex/Jellyfin, and Synology Photos/Immich - not decided quite what solutions to go for.
Appricate any tips :sparkles:
If you want a “setup and forget” type of experience, synology will serve you well, if you can afford it. Of you are more of a tinkerer and see yourself experimenting and upgrading in the future, then I recommend custom built. OMV is a solid OS for a novice, but any Linux distro you fancy most can do the job very well!
I’ve started my NAS journey with a very humble 1-bay synology. For the last few years I am using a custom built ARM NAS (nanopi m4v2), with 4-bays and running Armbian. All my services run on docker, I have Jellyfin, *arr, bitwarden and several other servicies running very reliably.
And if you’re not sure how much of tinkering you want to do a Synology with docker support is a good option.
^ This. I have an M1 Mac mini running Asahi Linux with a bunch of docker containers and it works great. Run Jellyfin off of a separate stick PC running an Intel Celeron with Ubuntu Mate on it. Basically I just have docker compose files on those two machines and occasionally ssh in from my phone to
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y(on Ubuntu) orsudo pacman -Syu(on Asahi) and thendocker compose pull && docker compose up -d