First NAS Setup: Best 4-Bay Synology for Jellyfin reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Flat_Dot3507 · 2023-11-04 19:06 Hello, I'm new to NAS and looking to set up a home server for media streaming with Jellyfin. I've heard that Synology is a good choice, especially for Jellyfin. Should I go for a 4-bay NAS instead of a 2-bay? If so, what's the best 4-bay Synology NAS for Jellyfin in 2023? Regarding storage, I'm unsure about the ideal HDD size, considering anything from 4 TB to 16 TB. I'm a beginner with a relatively small media collection. What would you recommend? I also have some questions about backups and RAID. Should I consider setting up a backup system or RAID for added data protection? Are there any straightforward guides for setting up a NAS with Jellyfin? Do I need a VPN for added security, and should I consider using *arr apps for media management? Your advice is greatly appreciated. Thank you! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dazchad · 2023-11-04 20:47 If you plan on doing transcoding with jellyfin, I’d advise getting a minipc with Intel 12th gen or newer. Older CPUs work too, but 12th will give all modern codecs and excellent performance. Synology CPU simply isnt powerful enough for meaningful transcoding. RAID is not backup. You still need to backup in another device, and offsite. HD size is whatever you can afford. Note that you should have all of the same size because some RAID configurations will use the smallest size. Also note that you can’t shrink a volume, only expand. This means that if you decide to use one HD for any other thing, you will have to destroy your volume. For arr you don’t need VPN, although many people will put them behind one. You most likely want a VPN for torrent and/or nzbd though. The rest you can google. There are plenty of information out there. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nightmareFluffy · 2023-11-05 00:38 I use RAID for data resiliency in work applications, and back it up as well. In your case for a personal home use, you have to decide for yourself, but you might not need RAID if it's for a non-mission- critical thing. Non-RAID will give you more storage. Only caveat is that RAID can also be used for speeding things up (like RAID 0, which is a certain RAID mode by using drives that mirror data), but I prefer to use SSDs when I need speed. It's also annoying when a hard drive goes down and you don't have RAID, but if it's for something like movies, you can just rebuild it from the backup. For HD size for a small media collection, get a 4-bay with 2 16 GB's. It's much easier to add more drives to a 4-bay than to switch to a new NAS. Also, keep in mind that some HD's are faster than others, so it depends on how many concurrent users you expect. If it's like 2 users max, then any HD will work. If it's more, a faster one is needed. If it's a ton of users (like if you're sharing with friends), you might want to get SSD's. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- string-user-equals · 2023-11-05 02:20 As far as backup goes, I personally don’t worry about backing up the media itself or the media server itself. But, Sonarr/Radarr/Overseerr are must haves for me. Their backups are usually very small and what’s important to me is the catalog of my media. So I back this up to AWS glacier with duplicati. If I ever loose my server, I’ll just restore Sonarr/Radarr/Overseerr and tell it to go redownload my stuff