Decent bang for the buck: not the very cheapest approach, but still affordable, especially once you factor in time spent as well as energy costs.

This vastly simplifies questions about CPUs, motherboard chipsets, Linux flavors etc. Self-contained experience that’s not as overwhelming as a completely do-it-yourself approach where you build a computer or NAS from individual components and have to select, install, and maintain its operating system.

To start, let’s frame what consumer-grade, prebuilt NAS devices such as those from Synology or QNAP are uniquely good at: This entry is very broad but relatively shallow to give a sense of the massive possibilities within reach of even cheaper devices and will point to other sites for in-depth details.Ĩ. You are the people I’m trying to help, as I’ve been going through that journey myself. I believe there’s a large number of people who have a vague sense they could get more out of their NAS, but don’t quite know where to start. The content here is probably too technical for complete newbies, and not advanced enough for people already on the forefront of homelabs and self-hosted services. Its intended audience is made of savvy home users that have a variety of professional and personal needs. This entry will run the gamut of services you can use on modern NASes. It is thus time to see even cheap NASes as bona fide servers and not just storage. In parallel Docker has emerged as a ubiquitous platform to easily and quickly deploy software regardless of the underlying operating system. While the initial consumer-grade NASes sold during the late 2000s/early 2010s had fairly weak CPUs and little memory, newer models priced in the $200-$500 range from about 2019 forward are way more powerful.

Calibre server synology