For years, I’ve had bouts of temptation when it comes to setting up a NAS. The other day, I finally made the leap and put one on order.

I’ve been using an External Thunderbay Thunderbolt drive enclosure for years, and it holds my iTunes TV and movie collection, as well as some other varied files.

My MacBook Pro has a large SSD, but not that large, so external storage is a must.

Here are the factors that finally conspired to make me plunge into the NAS world.

Compared to my normally-silent MBP, the fan and drives in that enclosure seem loud, so I mostly have it disconnected and powered down. My plan is to locate the NAS somewhere else, assuming it is louder than I’d like if I keep it in the same room.

I use a Time Capsule for Time Machine backups, and I know its days are numbered, as Apple (unwisely IMHO) got out of the router/storage game. And it’s actually been too small for a while now, I’d like to have more computers backing up to it and have a deeper version history.

I’d been thinking of switching to an iMac from my MBP when the new Apple Silicon iMacs release, and one thought was to buy that system with a large enough internal drive to hold all of my media. I have a fairly small collection, no ripped Blu-rays or anything, so all I need is around 4TB. Looking at the current price to bump an iMac up from 4TB to 8TB, and that $1,200 is an eye-opener.

I decided I could buy a lot of NAS for that price!

So here I am, with a Synology DS418 on order, and a few drives.

I started to do the thing I always do, and the thing that stopped my last NAS pondering a couple years back, which is steadily ramp up the price. “The DS418 looks fine, but what if I want to run something in Docker? I really should get the DS918. And gosh, the DS920 is not much more money than that, and …”

I’d do that, and then say, “wow, that’s a lot of money for what is basically some external storage”, and abandon the idea. So this time I just said, “The DS418 is plenty for your actual needs,” and clicked the button.

And I’m sure it will be. My needs are pretty simple, I don’t even expect to run Plex or anything like that. I am hoping the Synology AppleTV stuff will work well, but if it doesn’t my plan B (and maybe still actually plan A) is to do what I do today, and serve my media from my MBP, with it “directly” reading the media drive.

I’m sure there will be some surprises, both good and bad, but at least I decided to get in the game.