I’ve been self-hosting for 8+ years, mostly Plex + *Arr stack, docker, and some HomeBrew scripts. I got tired of my external drives being a mess and picked up a terra-master NAS (F4-425 PLUS). My original idea was to just use it for storage, but now seeing TOS 6 has a lot of applications it can run on-device, I’m trying to figure out what my best solutions are for two distinct parts: drive setup & applications I migrate from my Mac Mini onto it.
Drive Setup
Do I really need RAID? I’m perfectly fine without my drives pooled into a single drive. Aside from Plex, I’d love to have TimeMachine continue to work (if it’s on the NAS, even better) and that’s its own partition / format in of itself. When I shuck my drives and put them in the NAS, I’ll have 2 good drives and a third that’s likely going to die in the next 6-12 months. My understanding is RAID’s redundancy will take up a lot of free space on the drives and I’m not sure how useful that would be. Can I just run the NAS with multiple drives each operating on their own, like I do now?
Application Setup
Given the NAS has the same RAM of my current server, I’d think it’s a no-brainer to migrate Plex to it and gain the advantages of more power and not having to saturate my LAN by keeping the software + files all on the same NAS. But what about the *arr stack? SabNZBd? I also use some scripts and HomeBrew packages for YT-DLP content as well. Does it even make sense to migrate everything over if I don’t feel the need to decommission my current server? I say this because I run Mastodon, Overseer, and other self hosting containers and think it may be easier to admin them on an actual computer I can tinker on but is now isolated from affecting the NAS. Finally, I’m NOT considering changing the OS at this time as TOS 6 looks to be powerful but beginner-friendly enough for me. I know about TrueNAS and Unraid but don’t feel the need to look at those at this time.
Anyhow, I know this may be a lot to read, but I’d like to get this right before having to re-do my setup three or four times to settle on something that I could’ve known from the start. Info and tips on this setup are appreciated. Thank you.
If everything you’re running is in a Docker container, you can see if the underlying NAS OS has or can support Docker. If so, you could consider migrating some apps since that kind of migration should be pretty straightforward depending on how you setup your containers.
I have a Synology NAS and I went from managing my containers through Synology apps to just running everything through the command line directly.
More recently I stumbled onto Homepage (https://gethomepage.dev/) to keep an eye on my apps, and I started using the free edition of Portainer (CE, https://github.com/portainer/portainer) to manage my containers. I even have two Portainer containers running on different servers and I can manage them directly from one Portainer instance.
Individually Homepage and Portainer were game changers for me since they solved specific gaps I had in my manual processes.
If you’re in the mood to rethink your entire setup, I would recommend looking into Homepage and / or Portainer.
I progressively migrated containers into Portainer stacks while also putting everything into Homepage, so I just moved along at my own pace.