Thank you for your insights.
My primary issue with Synology NASes or prebuild NASes in common is the lack of upgradeability. I am quite happy with the one I’ve got but it is underpowered and underspeced for what I sometimes want to do. Hence I converted my old gaming rig into a server for those purposes.
I’ve tried the Synology Apps but I don’t like to link myself into one ecosystem for what should be simple tasks. So I am looking for alternatives.
I somehow have to find a middle ground in usability for me and my companions.
Thank you for your answer.
I agree with you that Server Hardware is overkill. That’s why I am asking for options here. For your suggested architecture: It is quite ancient and eol per last year and I have one of these already in use as a “more than my NAS thingy”. What I am not comfortable with is that that generation is already end of life and I don’t want to invest time and money into hardware that I would have to replace a year or two from now. I’m looking for a solution (self built or not) that will drag me through the next decade. Does BTRFS include Raid support? I don’t have much experience with it. The most I did once was recover a snapshot.
CPU is the least of my concerns. I am currently looking at a low end current gen Intel CPU for my purpose. And yes, samba is slow and I will never saturate a somewhat recent CPU with it, but I have from time to time other things running on that machine.
For storage: You are overestimating a bit with the prices. For 200€ I can get 4TB SSDs. So 20TB + one for raid 5 ~1200€. That would be quite doable but on the expensive side I agree. The question was whether SSDs were considerable cause of power usage, not from a price standpoint.
As fro Syncthing… I’ll have a look at that.
Docker is just nice and simple. I remember times when deploying software on a single server was hell on earth. Conflicting libraries etc. And yes Linux isn’t hard (been using it for like 2 decades).