You basically just described kanban.

And it always marks the damn “thank you for contacting Microsoft” post as “the answer”

I agree with the other poster; you should look into proxmox. I migrated from ESXi to proxmox 7-8 years ago or so, and honestly its been WAY better than ESXi. The migration process was pretty easy too, i was able to bring over the images from ESXi and load them directly into proxmox.

Running arr services on a proxmox cluster to download to a device on the same network. I don’t think there would be any problems but wanted to see what changes need to be done.

I’m essentially doing this with my set up. I have a box running proxmox and a separate networked nas device. There aren’t really any changes, per se, other than pointing the *arr installs at the correct mounts. One thing to make note of, i would make sure that your download, processing, and final locations are all within the same mount point, so that you can take advantage of atomic moves.

Also, I assume it’s because the xml file in maven is typically called a “pom” file, so expanding that to pomni for some reason? It still doesn’t make a ton of sense

I have mediacom as well, but in a larger city of the midwest. They have datacaps here too, and i was paying about $100 for exactly this same plan up until a couple years ago. They started upgrading our speeds/caps because a new fiber company (metronet) is building in the area. Now i’m on 1 gbps down and a 4 TB cap. I still plan to switch to metronet when they finally light up my area, as its cheaper for the same speeds (plus no data caps)

If that’s the case you’ll probably be well served with that model you linked above.

As for what your options are, there’s a ton of functionality you can add to them through apps and can even practically run whole VMs on them. Probably not a great idea with the above model but the option is there.

Technically you could set it up as a pihole as well, yes, you’d need to install the docker service and load a DNS service and pihole into it, you can probably find some guides online how to do so.

Pending on your use case, it’s probably fine; If you just want to have your own photos backup/home cloud server, it will probably serve you very well. This particular model is not very powerful (though most synology nas enclosures aren’t super beefy in general), so as long as you arent expecting it to be a work horse for any heavy duty calculations (transcoding in plex, hosting VMs or docker containers, etc.), it will probably work out great. It would probably also struggle if you expect to have lots of user (10+) using it frequently.

Thank you for taking your time to answer my questions!

No problem!

Is there any benefits of buying directly from them? I think I would get a single bay enclosure and 4tb disk (I should be able to close in a $200$250 range).

Not really. I just wanted to point out that base purchasing from official stores does NOT include storage, generally. As far any “advantages”, the only i can think of is that you know its brand new if it comes from an official synology store. Depends on how comfortable you are with second hand or refurb hardware if that’s what you’re looking at (though other stores can be selling brand new as well)

It probably wouldn’t be just me using it though - I would probably include my partner in it. Is it possible to have separate accounts for Drive and Moments so our photos/files wouldn’t overlap?

Yep. It has multi-user support, and you can even designated shared spaces for photos you can both access. Each of the synology cloud offerings (photos, drive, and all the other stuff) generally requires one account per user that is sectioned off into their own area.

EDIT: Have you used the self hosted email functionality? Can you recommend it over let’s say Proton Mail?

Nope, i haven’t. I’d be wary of self-hosting email in general, though, just because i feel like that’s a one-way ticket to all your emails being marked as spam.

Yes, DSM is the OS on all the synology nas enclosures. I’ve heard you can install it on custom built nas devices, but I don’t know the details there, or if its easy to do or not. I would suspect its probably more difficult than not, just because synology is in the business of selling their nas devices more than anything. I have no idea how it would work installing it on 3rd party hardware at all, though.

As for synology moments, its an app that can be installed on DSM. Most of the additional apps are free (moments included), but off hand i know of one notable exception: Surveillance. You need a per camera license for their surveillance software, and IIRC every nas device comes with a “free” 2 camera license, but you have to purchase more if you want more cameras.

They actually have a pretty good ecosystem of apps on synology as well, including things like docker, plex, git, etc. that can all be installed directly on the nas itself and run as a service off of it.

It’s worth noting that if you’re buying the enclosures directly from synology, they generally don’t come with any HDDs at all, you have to buy those separately. Not sure where you’re seeing your “$200 for enclosure + 2TB”, but i just wanted to put that out there as “make sure it actually includes drives if its through an official store or something” warning.

second/third this. synology nas’s are great! I’ve been running one for almost a decade now. They run a good line between being very powerful and very user friendly so you don’t have to be super technical to get them working. To a large extent, they can almost be completely plug and play, depending on what you’re looking for.