I've been thinking about going down this route. How many hard drives do you have set up on your NAS? How expensive was it?
I’ve actually got two Synology NAS units running at home, so I figured I’d share my setup in case it helps put the storage conversation into perspective.
My main NAS handles our cloud storage, office apps, my business's storage, and all of our Plex media. That last part is the real space hog; most people don’t need anywhere near that much storage. It’s a 5‑bay unit running five 12TB drives, but outside of Plex, I only use about 2TB for everything else. If I weren’t running a media server, I’d probably be using 2TB drives instead.
For most people, a 2‑bay unit is more than enough. However, a 4‑bay gives you plenty of room to grow, and with RAID, you can lose drives without losing data. My second NAS is just for security cameras and a couple of smart‑home things. Cameras are brutal on drives, so I didn’t want them chewing through my big 12TB disks. I think the ones in that unit are 4TB because they were cheaper than 2TB at the time.
Cost‑wise, my 5‑bay was around $700, and the 12TB drives were about $250 each. Again, I wouldn’t recommend that unless you’re doing Plex. The smaller 4TB drives were under $70. The 2‑bay unit was about $400 (it is a higher-tier one for their security system running on it).
If I were starting fresh today (without Plex), I’d probably recommend something like the Synology DS925+ 4-bay with two 2TB drives to start, around $700–800 total. Or the DS425+ 4‑bay setup for roughly $600. For pure file storage, even the DS225+ with two 2TB drives (around $400 with drives) works great as a home cloud.
I also use Synology’s C2 cloud backup for off‑site backups, which runs me about $70 a year. You can do off‑site backups yourself with another NAS and a family/friend's house. Just a heads‑up: services like Backblaze tend to get grumpy when you connect a NAS because they want to classify it as business use. Or you can just not do them, but that is your choice, and my setup (while it does have backups on it and some go to the second NAS in the event of a complete failure) is susceptible to things like a house fire.
It’s definitely not the cheapest route. My whole setup is pushing $2,000, more than most people need, but it’s replaced all of our streaming subs, cloud storage, and even cable. I set it up in 2023, and between Netflix, Spotify, OneDrive, etc., it’s basically paid for itself by now. And honestly, owning all my data and not relying on companies constantly changing prices or features has been worth it.
Now, I do have to say, it is a project, and there is a lot to it. This doesn't include my network upgrades or the battery backups I run them on, and such.
But I will say, when the internet is down, or the big providers go down, we can just continue as normal at home. Queue up our movie, work on our files, etc., it is really nice. And this is just my setup. You can build with UnRaid/FreeNAS, and there are other companies out there.
