New to NAS and need some guidance

A NAS is basically a self-contained computer with either or both SSD or HDD storage. You can purchase them without any drives or have Synology pre-equip them for you. Synology now offers NAS-specific drives as well.

FWIW, I have been using a Synology DS916+ NAS on my network that consist of a number of Macs, and PC (running either Windows or Linux).

One of the greatest features of using a NAS is that it can support a variety of services, including most of what you have listed in your post.

The NAS I have is a four HDD model, and has the option to add another drive bay to extend that; however, I have yet to have a need to do so. I also do not incorporate any RAID configurations.

In addition to performing as a basic file server, I have my NAS configured for:

• A Time Machine backup destination for my Macs.
• A Synology-based backup solution for my PCs.
• A Plex server.
• A Docker host.

It has been running flawlessly since 2016, when I purchased it. (Hint: Synology typically uses the year as the last two digits for their model numbers.)

You may not need a four-bay model, and they do have two-bay ones as well. They even has a budget line, called "Bee." Synology also offers a "NAS Selector" to help you choose which of their NAS models will work best for you and I suggest you give it a try.

Feel free to ask any questions and I will be happy to address them the best I can from my experience with my NAS.

The most alarming things about your posting is mentioning RAID.

R in RAID is for redundant, but RAID is NOT backup!

• Mirrored RAID is used to reduce the time-to-repair after a failure, and to keep drive failures from becoming a data disaster. It does not protect from human error, crazy software, or 'just-because' failures.

• Striped RAID can be somewhat faster in some cases (especially in an array built from Rotating Magnetic drives), but it is brittle, and you MUST have another copy nearby in case of failure. A striped RAID failure destroys EVERYTHING on it, with No hope of recovery. Most users would be better served by a faster SSD than a striped rotating magnetic RAID.

• Concatenated RAID is not really RAID at all, it is "just a bunch of drives" aka JBOD, pasted together and acting as if it were one HUGE drive. So you can take two larger drives, concatenate them into one Volume, and have a really big Backup drive, for example.

• RAID 5 computes checksums of the data blocks (in real-time, coming and going), and stores two copies of the data AND the checksum blocks in such a way that a failure in any one of the three drives still allows the data can to be recovered from the other two drives. It requires checksum-computing hardware to be seen as anywhere near fast enough for most uses.

Criticisms of RAID-5 include the cost and delays induced by the extra hardware, and the HUGE amount of time it takes to re-create a large data set using RAID-5. Re-creation time is so large, another drive is non-trivially likely to fail in the time it takes to re-create the data, making the entire concept shaky.

Executive summary: Most users would be better served using multiple drives to make multiple backups, rather than dedicating multiple drives to RAID arrays.

When people ask me, should I buy a large new_thing, or a truly enormous new_thing, for should I get one that blocks out the sun? My response is about the same. Don't do ANY of that unless until you can quantify how your current solution falls short of your expectations.

This is what you start doing today:

Enable Mac File Sharing on your Studio, knowing full well that you do not intend that to be the long-term solution. If you do not think there is enough space, add some drives. you can re-use those drives for most other setups.

Make a fast easily-available Ethernet connection between your Studio and some portion of your network. DO NOT consider Internet Router access the highest priority -- once you start doing File Sharing, you will come to think of access to the Internet as a small part of your Home system, and treat it properly as a spur off the main File Sharing branch.

Keep in mind that anything that has a connection to your Home network using any medium including Wi-Fi is connected, and can freely use all parts of it, including the Internet spur and the fast ethernet "backbone" you create.

If you would like to do Network Backups, File Sharing can be additionally configured to have a large drive on a Mac be a Shared Backup destination for Time Machine for multiple computers.

Live with that for a while. Then step back and look at what you have built. If parts are not large enough/fast enough/ responsive enough/ -- THEN start thinking about how to stretch what you have already built into something that better meets your needs. and you can stretch it in EXACTLY the way you need to.

Set up file sharing on Mac - Apple Support

Back up to a shared folder with Time Machine on Mac - Apple Support