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I’m new to NAS hardware and how it works.

If I buy a NAS, say from Synology, would I be able to just chuck my existing EXT4 HDDs full of data in there and it’ll work? Maybe even one or two with different file systems? I’m not too worried about backups or RAID yet.

What are the limitations of dedicated NAS hardware? Can I also… “store” stuff on there? Like, say, have a “schmorrent” 🏴‍☠️ client save “data” directly to the drives from another computer on the network? Or do all services interacting with the data storage need to run on the NAS hardware?

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sakphul@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
You cannot use drives that already have data on them in a Synology. They will be “Wiped” during the installation/initialization process. If you can save the data somewhere else you can put it back on the NAS after Installation. I don’t know if this is also the case for QNAP or Asustor.

you can definetly store data, from a Service running on a different machine, to the NAS. This is the whole point of having a NAS. Limitation is network latency and bandwith. But this is no problem for the typical home user use case. If you habe a special use case you propably already know what you need and how to do it.

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anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
A big point of a NAS in my mind is to run some sort of redundancy, which means you will want to setup a RAID on the drives in the NAS, and that in turn means that my recommendation wouldn’t be to chuck existing drives into the NAS solution but to setup the NAS drives and then copy your data to it.

Dedicated NAS hardware storage is usually accessed over SMB, NFS or SFTP and most software has support for one of those protocols.
Some services can have hiccups when running against networked storage, f.e. Jellyfin might lose library metadata if the Jellyfin service’s library scan is started and the networked storage is unavailable.

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- victorz@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Thanks for the notes on network storage access protocols!
  
  A big point of a NAS in my mind is to run some sort of redundancy, which means you will want to setup a RAID on the drives in the NAS
  
  Cool, thank you for that as well, and I was aware of that so I thought I would mention that in my previous comment. But I was specifically wondering if I could in fact just chuck them in as-is and it would be able to access the drives? Because like, they’re separate drives, right? How would that work in a non-RAID setup when accessing from another computer? Would they show up as separate drives? Is it at all possible?
  
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  - irmadlad@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    I was specifically wondering if I could in fact just chuck them in as-is and it would be able to access the drives? Because like, they’re separate drives, right? How would that work in a non-RAID setup when accessing from another computer? Would they show up as separate drives? Is it at all possible?
    
    I have a shelf of NetGear ReadyNas-4 bay enclosures. They are old as the hills ReadyNas 214 with OS 6.10.3. The first 2 of them are set up as JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Drives) 8 bays x 10 tb drives . They have no RAID setups on them. They all show up as separate drives. Now, you may need to set up permissions to access the drives, but they all act independently of each other. However, in that setup, if a drive fails, well you’re SOL. Some caveats would be that the drives to be inserted into the JBOD NAS setup need to be formatted in a compatible file system such as EXT4 or NTFS
    
    The other 2 ReadyNas-4 bay enclosures are set up as RAID 10. So using RAID 10, you have ~30 tb usable space and 1 10tb drive for redundancy per each ReadyNas unit.
    
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  - anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Depends on the operating system of the NAS, but generally the NAS will want to format the drive. Even if you can somehow get it running without a disk format you’re generally in an unsupported configuration.
    
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    victorz@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Yeesh, okay, I see.
    
    Then maybe some kind of compact drive bay would suit my needs better for now, that I would just connect to a mini PC of some sort.
    
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