Many of us are sysadmins at home. Home Assistant, home NAS, home DVRs, etc. Consumer NASes are in tension against the DIY hacker / homelab people who often run these things. These NASes are just complicated enough to be consumer unfriendly, but not enough for "our" needs. The author has a good point about how NAS hardware is more integrated - less capable for power users - while the software has stagnated into a sort of semi embedded, minimal viable product.
Just yesterday I heard about a friend-of-a-friend type situation where the sysadmin husband was in hospice, and the wife was struggling to figure out how to operate the NAS to recover family photos, etc.
I think consumer NAS manufacturers could add a "foolproof backup connection method," such as a USB port in USB device mode, so the NAS could be easily connected to a laptop by someone with little computer knowledge, in read-only mode.
That said, my home NAS is "the littlest server": an aging ProLiant DL380 Gen8 MicroServer. It's behind a double conversion UPS. SAS card + drives, Proxmox running virtualized FreeNAS, etc. Typical overdone geek build. I have not seen a finer NAS platform for the precocious home admin. I wish there were newer versions which kept the enterprise style "lights out management," and added m.2 and such, but I think HP Enterprise as a company is not interested in the homelab use case.
This architectural shift eliminates the user’s ability to expand memory capacity as self-hosting demands grow, effectively putting a permanent ceiling on running memory-heavy Docker containers, ZFS pools, or virtual machines.
That's not a NAS anymore, that's a full server. I think of a NAS as "low-power computer with lots of storage attached", so not being able to upgrade the RAM on one isn't all that surprising.
Well that's just for home use. Say a small to medium enterprise needing a shared drive. Or even things like say video editing you might need a 10G connection. Furthermore for most it's just a hobby so there's no right or wrong, if you can live with the noise and power of old enterprise gear then kudos to you, or if you think a raspberry pi with a sata hat works then go ahead
I run some light services on my NAS cause well, in the end, the distinction in naming is arbitrary at best, it’s a computer, and I use it for computer things. In an ideal world where I can afford separate purpose-built machines for everything, I’ll have a storage-only NAS, but it’s a computer I have that also happens to have many hard drive bays. Being able to service my own machines shouldn’t be all that surprising either.
Then, sorry, but you don't understand today's NAS market. All it takes is looking at the products QNAP, Minisforum, TruNAS, UnRAID and many more have been putting out for years - and it sells well. Nobody wants more infrastructure than they need and a well powered NAS is a great place for homelabbers and SMB to invest.
I just recommended an N5 Air [0] to a friend because it's got a powerful CPU, can expand to 96GB of RAM, has a great mix of NVME and HDD and has a PCI slot they can run an Intel A310 in for local transcode. It's the perfect Proxmox host to run everything they'd want to do including local services but also fault tolerant storage for a reasonable price.
I think of a modern consumer NAS as a backdoor server that a user buys to solve one problem they know they have, plus a whole bunch of additional problems they didn't know they have... A critical part of of the vanguard in the war against proprietary centralizing webapps.
Sure, but then shouldn’t they have a lower power CPU?
I’d be worried about starving my storage need for CPU (ZFS can use a good amount of CPU power) inadvertently.
Running some small services is nice, to avoid having more devices, but I think people want “server with storage” and not actually a NAS, which on the face of it is growing out from nothing more than an SMB share.
storage has also increased (thus, its management overheads).
And, to be honest with you, I’d prefer phones that are battery powered get the 3nm process node and these kind of devices lagging on 7nm or whatever, since they have the capability to be powered from the wall, and you can have less consumptive cpus taking a larger spaces making a bit more heat/power per cycle: but since you need less you can get away with it.
Not everything can be 3nm or lower, the yields aren't good enough.
Plenty of people run ad-blocking DNS on their router, or mesh VPN software. Handy for devices where you can't install an ad blocker directly, and for working around CGNAT issues due to IPv4 exhaustion.
If my microwave had programmable firmware I'd absolutely reprogram it, get rid of the annoying clock and make my own quick buttons for my most common meals...
My microwave, unfortunately, is closed source. However my home router runs a web server, and my cellphone runs a service called Airdrop, when I turn it on.
For business it should be all storage. But for home use the best is all-in-one. A home user doesn’t benefit from specialization of equipment, just brings them more headaches managing more stuff. One device that has storage and can also run Plex, Immich, HA in a single package makes the lives much easier for those who have to take care of the IT in the house especially of they’re not “IT people”.
It's just 2 different usages of "NAS" for different contexts.
In a business/enterprise environment, "NAS" is a more constrained definition of a single-purpose rack that only does storage duties.
However, in a home environment, "NAS" is a fuzzier definition to also include running "apps" like Home Assistant, Plex/Jellyfish media, or webcam video analysis. Either in containers or vms. Both the vendors Synology/QNAP/UGREEN and the consumers use "NAS" in this looser definition. If you go out on Google search or Amazon to search for a "home server" to buy, you will get "NAS appliances" as the results. This happens because a NAS in a home usage has plenty of idle CPU leftover to run extra apps that's not strictly just storage. Buying a 2nd computer to run apps just to satisfy the NAS to remain as a "pure" NAS is a waste of money.
Similar situation to "routers". Business/enterprise routers are single purpose. But home routers from the ISP are fuzzier definitions. They also include a DHCP service, a firewall, and a Wi-Fi access point. Maybe the home versions are not "true pure routers" in the official OSI 7-layer sense. Ok, but home users still call them "routers".
Home server is a perfectly fine term for that. NAS brands show up on Google/Amazon searches because they're cross-advertising, just like how for a while "Bing" would be the top advertisement when you searched for "Google".
You also can invert the relationship and run a NAS on a physical home server. My storage solution is a JBOD ("Just a bunch of disks") attached to a Proxmox virtualization host, where my home server runs as a VM inside Proxmox and then exposes selected directories via Samba to the home network. There's no second computer, I'm just running ~5 of them on one physical server. But by doing this, I get some isolation where if I've downloaded a questionable file, I can quarantine and inspect it (and roll back to a VM checkpoint if it compromises the machine) before I unleash it on the non-technical users of my home network.
I don't mind too much that a NAS runs file-sharing-oriented software as a bonus feature - if it can run Samba why can't it run Immich? But when you start using it for compute tasks it's not a storage box any more by definition. And that would be a more advanced extra feature whereas the basic functionality of a storage box is always storage.
Exactly! But don’t let the terminology bog you down. There is no market for single purpose (exclusively NAS, exclusively router, etc.) specialized devices outside of enterprise.
We call it a NAS like we call the general purpose computer in our pockets a “phone”. Or the home server that connects to our ISP a “router”.
I think we can all agree that "NAS" for consumers is a marketing term, like "atomic clock". Anyone who works in an office with a NAS may come to admire its functions, and want the same experience at home.
When I think of NAS, I think of Network Appliance. Even in the mid-90s they were already well-known as the makers of the most formidable turnkey NAS that an enterprise could have. They are so awesome and specialized that I never even worked near one. Their systems were called "filers" and they have proprietary filesystems with proprietary kernels and CLI, that present with an NFS interface, among other things. The Filers are blazingly fast and ultra-high-capacity.
You missed the point the author really complains about: soldered in memory chips create a single point of failure.
What you quoted needs to be seen in the context of what author calls "increasing media demands". I.e. the author believes that while the way the system is configured might be OK today, it won't be OK in the future.
Memory chips failing to me sounds like extremely bizarre fear. Memory has been extremely reliable for long time now. It is much more likely any other component on same mainboard failing than memory.
> That's not a NAS anymore, that's a full server. I think of a NAS as "low-power computer with lots of storage attached"
I disagree. And we can at least discuss whether a NAS that doesn't have ECC is that much of a NAS or not.
I'd take an old Xeon server with 64 GB of ECC memory, run its CPU in powersave mode, and slap TrueNAS (with ZFS) on it any day over buying a dedicated NAS.
YMMV but actual professional server gear, with ECC memory, is to me more of a NAS than a consumer NAS.
And nothing forces you to run a "full server": you can dedicate a real server to be only a NAS and slap the lowest consuming Xeon on it, which moreover you can run with a powersaving CPU governor.
Slap a 10 Gbit/s ethernet NIC in it and call it a day.
It shall be more reliable too.
You can of course cosplay with a consumer NAS but the real thing is better.
P.S: mine is a HP Z440 with a 14-cores Xeon (so a workstation, not a server: the advantage is that it's totally quiet)
Those Xeon E5's are 50w at idle, plus 10w for the 10Gb Ethernet, before you add any storage. A core 3 N300 is 1/10 of the power usage, for ~85% of the performance. Integrity at the filesystem level is required _anyway_ but if you want ECC ram, there's a bunch of AMD processors with similar power usage.
No fiddling is definitely not a primary point. If one has both valuable or large amounts of data fiddling is inevitable. Nothing I have seen in retail markets is at a level of chromecast or phone setup or TV setup.
And often not only the price is high but poor reliability.
Of course no fiddling is a primary point. That’s probably _the main point_. Sure you need _some_ configuration/setup, but it’s in a completely different ballpark to a custom built solution.
which brand? Anytime you have data locally it is lot of work. There is a reason people go to Google drive or even proton drive etc for that reason. If you can do that initial setup then DIY is not worse. Yes, all these plug-n-play give a false sense of security. One of the RAID drives is failing - no one knows.
Your definition of fiddling is maybe wrong. Not everyone is Linus S or Jeff geerling to look for that exact DDR stick etc. Get a resonable laptop or mini PC with 2 x drives. Done. Even windows drive share.
storage of data long-term of course to many segments of a market needs to be seamless and safe feeling, comforting even. To slap a brand on the side of a NAS that is complex and causes grandma to lose the entire family photo history that you scanned for a few summers after your uncle did research for decades - well, that's not great for repeat sales, right?
Believe me, you don't want a NAS at a chromecast level. Chromecasts are designed to be user friendly and hide a lot of settings. That wouldn't be a problem if the things worked at least. I can't even count how many times I've had to reset a chromecast because something broke and wasn't fixable.
A casual user would never buy a NAS at all, since most prefer the ease of something like iCloud or Google. If you buy a NAS you often have a specific reason to (too much data, needing to be able to reach a speed to work off of it, security...) and then the fiddeling becomes an advantage I feel. Yes it's a bit more effort, but you can get something that actually does what you want to instead of what the manufacturer thinks that you want it to do.
I suspect the energy efficiency correlates with how old it is -- modern silicon in laptops is amazing. I doubt a new PC would take up 45W like this i7 7700k-powered one I've had for years.
This "no fiddling" could be the single entire counterpoint to the article and hacker culture in general. All the problems stem from "consumer wants no fiddling".
I think it's a little more nuanced. Most people cannot fiddle (with PCs). They would have to learn to, first. Does this mean they deserve to have shit shoved down their throats? No. However, they are very vulnerable, and companies want to capitalize on this fact.
Hackers (whatever kind) are just one portion of the total populace. Others deserve genuinely good products, too. And maybe sometimes even a hacker wants to take a break. ;-)
> Most people cannot fiddle (with PCs). They would have to learn to, first. Does this mean they deserve to have shit shoved down their throats?
I can fiddle perfectly well. I do it all day at work, with workstations, servers and HPC. I can already scratch that itch with much nicer than I will be ever able to buy myself. But I am not spending 1 hour more than I need to for my NAS at home, life is too short and I also like to have other hobbies. To the point that yes, I do spend a bit more for convenience and niceness.
> And maybe sometimes even a hacker wants to take a break. ;-)
Its the maintenance and details that kill your NAS.
You will probably rely on it for 10 years at least, so building your NAS means committing to maintaining it in the long term, you have to be sure this is something you will uphold.
Also while setting up your NAS initially is definitely doable, there are a trillion little things to get right and make sure won't bite you later on (scrubble, etc).
All these things compounds if the NAS is not just for you, but your wife, kids, family, etc. Now it becomes your responsibility that all these precious data and photos entrusted to you are 100% safe for the decades to come.
But are these off-the-shelf solutions actually supported for ten years? And since they're usually bought for "easy remote connectivity" and whatnot, that's rather important. Bonus points for updates typically being installed automatically, so people won't even think to check whether it's still updated or not.
I have a NAS made from a 15-year-old computer, with standard parts. It can saturate a gigabit link over WireGuard, so it's good enough for my needs. I installed the latest Linux kernel on it the other day. And it doesn't have random unknown stuff calling home. Since it runs ZFS and scrubs regularly, I'm quite confident the data on it is still in good shape.
I ran a Synology DS418play for 8-9 years. It got OS and security updates throughout that time. I recently replaced it with a TrueNAS setup because I needed a dramatic capacity increase, but otherwise it would still be supported.
Almost all off-the-shelf consumer grade NAS appliances are running unmaintainable OS yocto builds already 2 years out of support, and a list of CVE under active exploitation.
The only really functional OSS NAS exception for small offices is the CephFS builds from https://www.45drives.com , and that is because of included support services. =3
> All these things compounds if the NAS is not just for you, but your wife, kids, family, etc. Now it becomes your responsibility that all these precious data and photos entrusted to you are 100% safe for the decades to come.
A NAS is not a backup? It's hot storage.
I have a NAS but I backup my photos on AWS in S3 Deep Glacier. It costs me less than $1 a month for 500GB of pictures. That's a backup.
From a maintenance perspective, one must not assume a NAS is a backup, but rather a high-bandwidth local/VPN file share.
* maids unplug equipment to vacuum offices (yes, this does really happen.)
* drives fail eventually, bit-rot is a thing, and filesystems evolve over time
* hardware specific features will always become a problem eventually. No one will check a degraded RAID/ZFS setup without service telemetry.
Practical options:
* sshfs + JBOD mount is fine for most home win11/bsd/linux/macOS/iOS/android users, as simple things have less failure modes and less time-cost to repair.
* fault tolerant systems like CephFS are usually too complex for home users. However, https://www.45drives.com offers a support option for small offices.
* ZFS has a lot of tradeoffs, and most people don't use the better key features (auto-snap-shotting and docker/VM deduplication.) In some cases even F2FS will also work fine, and probably last a bit longer with consumer flash drives.
* I agree the IT support issue with distros like TrueNAS or openmediavault becomes a popularity contest over what features are supported long-term.
It is often better to use a generic OpenBSD or Debian OS installation, and run the rclone network share abstractions on PC/Mac clients. Android and iPhone both have sftp clients for auto media backups over router VPN as well..
Lightning always wins every argument, an offsite VPN to remote file-backup is usually wise. =3
Hot-swappable, lockable drive bays with individual LED indicators. Needing more SATA ports than PCs typically come with. Features like auto-shutdown on USP failure that work out of the box. NICs with more than 1 Gbps. Lower power usage.
Situation on market is very simple to explain:
People spending months in 8-5 jobs to save money to buy HW don't bother to spend few minutes to make research on what they're buying.
I have Ugreen DXP4800 plus NAS with 10-core i5-1235u and 32GB RAM, 10GBit LAN for price of what people pay for Synology with 4-core low power Ryzen 1500 and 8GB RAM and 2,5GBit LAN.
And if I wanted to save money, I would buy some older workstation for pennies with hell lot of GB ECC's, lots of caddy's add extenion cards for NVMe.
I bought a plastic tower for disks which let's me have 10 disks with some space between them. I then bought some Artic fans and attached them with tape to the 'tower'. Then I used a 11 years old optiplex 990 as Debian zfs connected to 8 of the disks, and I have 2 spares which I'll be able to use when the others die.
Performance is great. I could do it because I was given those disks for free, with plenty of ours on each of them.
Several hardware generations back, my old 4x160GB raid5 had two drives on the bottom of the case, held on by screws going through holes I drilled in the outer wall of the case.
These days I managed to snag a deal on a Supermicro 846. I'm still settling into it, the main thing that concerns me is being able to suck enough air through the drive bays without making a lot of noise. My previous incarnation used some iStar toolless drive bays. I've learned to appreciate hot-swap bays, mainly for only having to do the cabling once.
For me, it was laziness. While I have the skills to built one from parts, I just wanted a big drive in an aesthetically pleasing box. I didn't want a project. I wanted something small and somewhat rugged. So I got a synology 5-bay almost seven years ago and have never looked back. It lives beside my UPS and wifi router in a small tower, all objects I expect to "just work" for months on end without any attention.
My AI rig ... that is a project. (After a kernel update, one of my GPUs has disappeared. Fixing that will be a project for my next day off.) I don't want my NAS to ever become a weekend project.
>using an old PC I had and it works great. Don't know why people are so crazy about buying prebuilt NASes.
The problem is the "old pc" is typically a desktop-class cpu which is very power hungry. (~100 watts). And to make things worse, the older cpu has slower performance that doesn't justify the extra watts it consumes.
For 17+ years, I used a 2008 era Intel DX58SO motherboard + Core i7 920 in a full size Silverstone tower case as my NAS. It originally started with 1.5 TB drives and I just kept upgrading the drives all the way up to 16 TB. It worked ok and was reliable so I was never interested in turnkey NAS appliance like Synology, etc. I also wanted to install my own os, plus recycle/reuse/repurpose philosophy, and not be shackled by a proprietary NAS ... yada yada yada. The big problem with re-using my old PC is that at idle, it consumed 125 watts.
Electricity isn't 11 cents per kWh like it was 17 years ago. It's now 21c/kWh -- and will keep going up because of AI, oil prices, etc.
Last month, I did a lot of research to reduce the power usage and ended up buying a UGREEN DXP4800 Pro NAS appliance. UGREEN lets you install your own os and it uses a laptop-class cpu (much better performance specs than Synology) which is much more power efficient. At idle, it consumes just 25 watts. Also, the Intel i3-1315U in the UGREEN has a Geekbench score of 2124 which beats the i7 920 of 450. So 4x the performance while using 1/5th the power usage!
I briefly considered "upgrading" my DX58SO/i7-920 to another old pc (2014 era) X99/i7-5820K. That's slightly more power efficient of ~80 watts idle. However, running ffmpeg to convert videos makes it jump to ~180w! The UGREEN can do the same ffmpeg conversion with better performance and yet it only increases to ~45 watts.
Another unexpected bonus of lower power usage is that my server room temperature is noticeably less warm, and the lower power UGREEN gets 3x the runtime on the APC battery backup when there's a power outage. The UGREEN did cost $700 but the savings on the electricity bill will recover that in about 4 years.
I also like the UGREEN toolless hard drive sleds. The old Silverstone tower hd sleds required screws. I also like the smaller footprint. The NAS appliance was a total quality-of-life improvement.
The only thing I "lost" from the old tower setup was the CD/DVD drive bay. But I don't rip discs anymore so I that doesn't matter. If I really really wanted to, I can hook up a DVD drive to the UGREEN via a SATA-to-USB adapter but I hope to never buy physical media again so I don't expect that will happen.
There's an allure to re-using a "free" old PC as a NAS and there's also the pride of a DIY storage solution. However, that mindset also makes one overlook the negatives of that setup. Sometimes, "free" items actually cost more money.
I got a UGREEN DXP6800 about two weeks ago on which I installed
FreeBSD, and was just noticing today how slow the USB is when I saw
this article mentioning a possible explanation (like ten times slower
than when I plug the same external SSD into another machine). Have you
noticed USB bandwidth issues in your setup or is it likely just some
misconfiguration on my part?
I believe that the target market for this equipment is small / medium size enterprises that need a solution for local storage of whatever information they process in their day-to-day operations. So, they won't have a system administrator on staff. They would rather try to assemble their computer system themselves or pay someone once to put things together. In this context, having a pre-built component that one can plug into the larger system is what customers would be looking for.
It's similar to the days when buying a PC would involve either finding a friend who could read the specs from the computer shop, make a list and assemble the PC once all the components are bought, or you'd buy a build from the shop (with some extra markup for the service). And today most PC users have moved on to laptops if not just even phones.
Most people will use what's commercially available. Today, most NAS users won't have an old PC case with HDD mounts laying around. They will have to buy something, and that something will likely be a pre-built NAS, the kind this article is written about. And similar to how laptops are a form of enshitification of desktops, these NAS boxes are too. Removing modularity drives the price down, but also doesn't allow the users the ability to repair and to study the product they own.
People aren't "crazy" about buying pre-built NAS boxes. It's what there is, they buy what's available.
I don't see these because I use the, 'I still don't care about cookies' add-on.
I also use, 'Cookie Auto-Delete', which deletes a sites cookies as soon as I close the tab, unless I specify to keep them, which I do on sites I want to remain logged into.
It surprises me people put up with these annoyances, or ads either.
> The cookie preference pop up on this site is unacceptable - 1 click to accept all cookies, SEVEN clicks to reject all cookies.
Yeah, that kinda dark pattern / malicious compliance junk ought to be straight up illegal. At least on par with "contempt of court" type situations. Sure, they may (just barely) comply with the absolute letter of the law, but the spirit of the law is surely being very much abused and deeply disrespected there.
> Yeah, that kinda dark pattern / malicious compliance junk ought to be straight up illegal.
It is illegal.
> To comply with the regulations governing cookies under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive you must:
> [...]
> - Allow users to access your service even if they refuse to allow the use of certain cookies
> - Make it as easy for users to withdraw their consent as it was for them to give their consent in the first place.
7 clicks is not as easy as one "accept all", violating the last point. Not allowing you to dismiss the banner and access the site violates the other point.
I have seen a few occasional sites that are even worse than this one.. Not only don't you get a reject all, you get two classes of settings, the default "types", and "trusted partners", and for trusted partners, about a third of them have what's called "legitimate interest" turned on, which means "we legitimately think we can share your data with this people after leading you to believe we haven't, and that's ok", and there are a hundred or more partners you have to scroll through and disable this for
And after a few minutes of reading a pop-up shows for joining their mailing list.
There is no mention of the usual enshittyfication, instead their complaint is that things look generic and that is the last of the list. I would say this is a feature.
The points about locking and dumbing down products are well researched, true and worrisome.
I’ve bought a NAS after watching NASCompares a few years ago, and also an ethernet adapter. His videos are nice. Talking about enshittyfication on an enshittyfied site misses the mark a little bit. “Legitimate interest”… lol.
And if you scroll down you get a popup to ask for your email for their newsletter. The irony of an article about enshittification on a site that is clearly enshittified is strong.
I don't share the author's view of the OSs becoming copycats of eachother and not that specialized.
Truth to be told, a NAS is the perfect place to have your home server. You can have both your applications and data on the same device and avoid having to build a lab just to have nextcloud or some other utility self hosted. However, to achieve this, the OS must become more similar to a normal linux distro, for better or for worse
While I don't disagree with the individual complaints, I've seen this niche go from running scuffed OSes on underpowered Synologies or building DIY NASes with limited case options like the Node 304, to multiple hot swap NASes running great x86 chips (and memory slots) and many DIY build paths including 3D printed cases. Things probably suck for those reliant on Synology, but I'm stoked for this hobby, especially when Minisforum/Aoostar to start pumping out Wildcat Lake stuff.
I think the biggest issue is hard drive (or SSD) costs currently. I got a UNAS 8 Pro a few months ago and it still sits empty. It's my own fault, I should have priced out the drives but I was buying Unifi equipment for a new house and wanted to try our their NAS offering.
I just looked and the hard drives I've bought before are currently >3x the price I last paid. I know I'm not telling anyone anything new but I'm just praying my existing drives hold out since replacing them (even 1) if they fail will cost a small fortune.
I use a mini amd pc with a disk bay. Surprisingly it is cheaper than many nas, and much more configurable (from memory to ssd) and have a much better gpu.
The only challenge would be finding a very good cable that stays solidly.
FYI the article is unreachable. Clicking the link results in an erroneous "you are on a black list! Email admin@nascompares.com if you think this is a mistake." message.
Given the article's bullet points, I would think the UGreen options bypass the first six... the following bullet points are just general market pricing issues and other issues outside of the NAS manufacturer's control.
EDIT: OK I see he doesn't like the onboard eMMC - fair enough.
I paid $280 for a DXP 2800, and was fortunate enough to get drives before the recent price increases. But I've only got 8GB and missed my window for an inexpensive jump to 16GB. Still it isn't having performance issues for my needs.
Serves as NAS, media server (Jellyfin), photo server (Immich). I've also dabbled with some web serving via pre-made docker images but haven't taken it very far.
I use UniFi Nas Pro - it is just a NAS, not a home server. I have it directly connected to my home server with a 10GB SFP+ link and it works super well.
Synology is truly dead to me now. I used their stuck mostly happily since my first DS412+ way back when. But this thing with locking down features to require their own branded drives is madness. No way, no how.
Last year they tried restricting the OS from creating new volumes unless all drives in it were Synology branded. People tore them a new asshole in the press and they backed away from that.
Now their newest DSM 7.4 release features a new smart storage system with postprocessing deduplication and compression. I tried to enable that on my own volume for testing, but nope: it only works on “pure Synology” volumes.
Fuck that. Synology, get this out of your damn heads. I will never, never buy your stupid, overpriced drives. It won’t happen. Never. And on top of the ludicrous price premium, if one breaks, how do I can get a replacement urgently? If my IronWolf blows up, I can drive over to Central Computer and come home with another just like it. Amazon has few Synology drives in stock and none of them are large. When I have a dead drive, the last thing I’m gonna want to do is go on an urgent quest for a replacement unicorn.
I’m done with ‘em. It’s clear they’re fixated on this stupid idea and aren’t going to give it up. Well, good luck with that and your remaining customer base, which no longer includes me.
The term got enshittified. Compare the definition over time via Wikipedia. Technically, NAS by the original definition can not host anything but a filesystem. It is simply free disk space, a SAN with a GUI. Anything you do to that disk space does not change what it is, until you start adding OS features, monitoring features, Wi-Fi, etc. Now it no longer is NAS - it is a server. We did this to ourselves.
I don't think it is that bad. Especially Ubnt just released their UNAS Pro. ( Although only comes with BTRFS on consumer and ZFS only on the Enterprise. )
I still think Apple should have bring their AirPort Express and Time Capsule back. Instead they wanted everyone to be on their iCloud subscription.
> Software Homogenization and Interface Uniformity
While I do prefer the DIY route, I'd struggle to call that "enshitified". Vensors consolidated around solutions because they work reliably, without reinventing the wheel. I'd much rather a NAS be a lightweight wrapper around a proven and easily maintained base than try to over extend themselves and jerry-rig some abomination.
And for customers who rely on them it means they can shift brands and still feel basically just at home.
Yep. On mobile it was basically impossible to read. 2/3 of the page was covered in ads and pop ups. I figure if they don’t care about the readers’ experience then I don’t care to try to read their content.
Just last month I bought a HP Micro server (N54L) from 2012, two second hand 4TB drives, 16GB of DDR3, and a 2.5GbE dual port network card. All in, that was about £180. I may shell out another £30 or so for a half depth, low profile graphics card that can support a couple of transcoding streams.
Reading the article, I don't regret it. Part of what puts me off the regular NAS market is price, but also things like non redundant boot options, ambiguity about whether or not I can install my own OS, and the lack of slots. The NAS form factor itself is off-putting because if you're buying something that isn't Synology or whatever, the RAM tax is still there.
Maybe I'm a cheapskate who will have slightly higher opex, but old hardware does seem to be pretty much as good as new hardware, to me.
Expensive drives have become such a pain. Maybe five years from now, if supply meets demand, I just wish I can afford a 1PB all-flash NAS. I really don't want to hear noise and I wish data centres would release their used supply on market. I will put backup on HDDs.
Soldered RAM and novel format hardware is a pain point. Macbook storage upgrade needs special custom hardware. Synology still doesn't allow third party HDDs in their extension units. NAS devices are truly a fantastic category on its own. My data remains local, while also allowing me to use it as a server for my workloads.
Server Part Deals is really good since they test the drives themselves. But even the used drives are on the verge of being unaffordable now. They increased the price of their 28TB re-certified drive last month by $120.
Well, you can take a walk on the wild side and for whatever reason this aggregator has a particularly robust set of sorting categories when it comes to hard drives. https://www.saleturbo.com/techdeals/
I've always had a relatively bad experience with NAS hardware. Not necessarily due to anything the hardware manufacturer could have done. I have lost entire enclosures to lightning strikes on more than one occasion. Everyone thinks their IT skills are hot shit until they wake up to a closet full of burned hardware in the morning. It is quite a humbling experience if you've never been through it before. There isn't any kind of semiconductor process tech, file system design or RAID configuration that can save you from this. An off-site backup is the only thing that would count, which brings me to my next point.
These days I just store my files in S3. Whether or not this actually costs me more money becomes a very irrelevant shade of grey once I factor in the value of my time and sanity. I prefer having the capability to store and retrieve large files, not spending time maintaining this capability. This is also my "off-site" backup. I am paying for my operational NAS and its backup effectively at the same time. No one doing DIY is remotely close to 99.999999999% durability, even with all the kings horses and men put together.
I often see this urgency with total control pushing tech people into the very systems of oppression they seek to avoid. Putting your bits in some blob storage provider like AWS is not "losing the game" unless you frame it that way in your head. You can frame it as "getting one over on the bad guys" if you are a little bit clever with how you approach the problem. You can compel Amazon host any kind of bits with a sprinkle of AES256 on the client. I've been a customer with them for over 15 years and not once have they rug pulled me. I've never seen a NAS-style solution survive that long without intervention.
I don't know dude I am running a NAS for my home, it has taken minimal maintenance. The main benefit is it's local on my LAN, so speed and latency are dictated by the drives and my switch not whatever is happening outside my home.
> Everyone thinks their IT skills are hot shit until they wake up to a closet full of burned hardware in the morning. It is quite a humbling experience if you've never been through it before.
> I've been a customer with them for over 15 years and not once have they rug pulled me.
I actually tend to agree with the thrust of your argument, but how is your view of getting your account banned different than others' view of managing a NAS?
> I have lost entire enclosures to lightning strikes on more than one occasion. Everyone thinks their IT skills are hot shit until they wake up to a closet full of burned hardware in the morning. It is quite a humbling experience if you've never been through it before. There isn't any kind of semiconductor process tech, file system design or RAID configuration that can save you from this.
Nightly? what happens in between and how many different sites? What happens if your Internet goes down one night? How many parity drives do you have? Will the array survive replacing a drive or will another one die during the sync will you lose data if that happens?
S3 takes replication seriously to a professional level, when you upload a file to S3 the chance of s3 losing it is capped by the chance of a civilization killing asteroid hitting the earth.
Yes. Nothing, one site. The backup gets taken the next night. One. Yes. Yes.
What happens if your drive dies just as you're uploading the file to S3? Why are we comparing the durability of S3 to the reliability of my Internet connection, instead of to the durability of rsync.net?
They're zfs snapshots, assuming you're actually taking them, a send/recv shouldn't cause any problems... (ignoring the hole_birth and encryption bugs from the 0.6.x days - to my knowledge, they should both be resolved by now)
I built my "NAS", which is just a normal computer with no GPU but 3 hard-drives in RAID 5, for $400 + storage cost. It is much more powerful that any NAS, even thousands of dollars ones, I'm not too sure at what cost (power consumption maybe?).
I don't understand why people would go with an actual pre-built NAS from a manufacturer over my approach. It's always a complete rip-off.
Here's my single story with NAS in 10+ years of software development.
A client had a NAS for their SaaS startup. Disks were having issues. The NAS was a prosumer product that was connected via USB. Had some SATA to SATA cable shipped by Amazon to the garage/colocation facility which basically meant removing the NAS and connecting the disks straight to the motherboard.
Issue solved.
It seems like one of those tarpit product categories that you are just better off by skipping completely, like ORMs, MCPs or reverse proxy HTTP servers.
Smart people always get the highest configuration in computers, unless they know they’ll never need some of the resources and can tolerate a lower option.
We've all what a terrible job LLMs do in some problems. But they are doing well at burning down Erdos's list of problems. Perhaps mathematicians aren't a good measure of "truly smart".
> Smart people always get the highest configuration in computers, unless they know they’ll never need some of the resources and can tolerate a lower option.
So if I'm buying a server and it's available with anything between 8GB and 4TB of RAM (the price difference being ~$70,000), and my current use only requires 8GB, how much should I get? There is a 50% chance the project fails and I never need more than 8GB and a 50% chance it succeeds and then I'll need 64GB or 512GB or 4TB depending on how well it goes.
Many of us are sysadmins at home. Home Assistant, home NAS, home DVRs, etc. Consumer NASes are in tension against the DIY hacker / homelab people who often run these things. These NASes are just complicated enough to be consumer unfriendly, but not enough for "our" needs. The author has a good point about how NAS hardware is more integrated - less capable for power users - while the software has stagnated into a sort of semi embedded, minimal viable product.
Just yesterday I heard about a friend-of-a-friend type situation where the sysadmin husband was in hospice, and the wife was struggling to figure out how to operate the NAS to recover family photos, etc.
I think consumer NAS manufacturers could add a "foolproof backup connection method," such as a USB port in USB device mode, so the NAS could be easily connected to a laptop by someone with little computer knowledge, in read-only mode.
That said, my home NAS is "the littlest server": an aging ProLiant DL380 Gen8 MicroServer. It's behind a double conversion UPS. SAS card + drives, Proxmox running virtualized FreeNAS, etc. Typical overdone geek build. I have not seen a finer NAS platform for the precocious home admin. I wish there were newer versions which kept the enterprise style "lights out management," and added m.2 and such, but I think HP Enterprise as a company is not interested in the homelab use case.
Consumer NASes should take advantage of physical presence. There should be better functionality for a user that is standing next to the thing.
This architectural shift eliminates the user’s ability to expand memory capacity as self-hosting demands grow, effectively putting a permanent ceiling on running memory-heavy Docker containers, ZFS pools, or virtual machines.
That's not a NAS anymore, that's a full server. I think of a NAS as "low-power computer with lots of storage attached", so not being able to upgrade the RAM on one isn't all that surprising.
Well that's just for home use. Say a small to medium enterprise needing a shared drive. Or even things like say video editing you might need a 10G connection. Furthermore for most it's just a hobby so there's no right or wrong, if you can live with the noise and power of old enterprise gear then kudos to you, or if you think a raspberry pi with a sata hat works then go ahead
>if you think a raspberry pi with a sata hat works then go ahead
With the price of drives right now I think I'll have to settle for a blueberry pie and a cowboy hat :\
Sorry to hurt so many net (and gross) peoples' feelings with my casual underestimation :(
Depending on the number of drives, you could instead probably afford some fancy cowboy footwear to go with your alternative purchases too.
Also depending on your preferred boot environment of course . . .
I run some light services on my NAS cause well, in the end, the distinction in naming is arbitrary at best, it’s a computer, and I use it for computer things. In an ideal world where I can afford separate purpose-built machines for everything, I’ll have a storage-only NAS, but it’s a computer I have that also happens to have many hard drive bays. Being able to service my own machines shouldn’t be all that surprising either.
Then, sorry, but you don't understand today's NAS market. All it takes is looking at the products QNAP, Minisforum, TruNAS, UnRAID and many more have been putting out for years - and it sells well. Nobody wants more infrastructure than they need and a well powered NAS is a great place for homelabbers and SMB to invest.
I just recommended an N5 Air [0] to a friend because it's got a powerful CPU, can expand to 96GB of RAM, has a great mix of NVME and HDD and has a PCI slot they can run an Intel A310 in for local transcode. It's the perfect Proxmox host to run everything they'd want to do including local services but also fault tolerant storage for a reasonable price.
[0] https://youtu.be/y8WFoV4ZSTg
I think of a modern consumer NAS as a backdoor server that a user buys to solve one problem they know they have, plus a whole bunch of additional problems they didn't know they have... A critical part of of the vanguard in the war against proprietary centralizing webapps.
If I have CPU power at my disposal, why should I waste it? I love the fact that my NAS can serve my other needs too.
Sure, but then shouldn’t they have a lower power CPU?
I’d be worried about starving my storage need for CPU (ZFS can use a good amount of CPU power) inadvertently.
Running some small services is nice, to avoid having more devices, but I think people want “server with storage” and not actually a NAS, which on the face of it is growing out from nothing more than an SMB share.
Lower power CPUs are very powerful nowadays. Like the one in your phone - it sips power and can do what a full server could do a decade ago.
storage has also increased (thus, its management overheads).
And, to be honest with you, I’d prefer phones that are battery powered get the 3nm process node and these kind of devices lagging on 7nm or whatever, since they have the capability to be powered from the wall, and you can have less consumptive cpus taking a larger spaces making a bit more heat/power per cycle: but since you need less you can get away with it.
Not everything can be 3nm or lower, the yields aren't good enough.
What I care more about is ECC.
The rumoured Apple server (for their use, not for customers) makes me sad. I want one.
Apple silicon with some other os would be an amazing low power nas.
Do you run services on your home router, your cellphone, and your microwave just because they have CPUs?
Your home router is a pretty good place to run some services… Highly recommend running VPN so you can access your home network from anywhere.
Plenty of people run ad-blocking DNS on their router, or mesh VPN software. Handy for devices where you can't install an ad blocker directly, and for working around CGNAT issues due to IPv4 exhaustion.
If my microwave had programmable firmware I'd absolutely reprogram it, get rid of the annoying clock and make my own quick buttons for my most common meals...
My microwave, unfortunately, is closed source. However my home router runs a web server, and my cellphone runs a service called Airdrop, when I turn it on.
For business it should be all storage. But for home use the best is all-in-one. A home user doesn’t benefit from specialization of equipment, just brings them more headaches managing more stuff. One device that has storage and can also run Plex, Immich, HA in a single package makes the lives much easier for those who have to take care of the IT in the house especially of they’re not “IT people”.
That isn't a NAS, then. It's a home server.
>That isn't a NAS, then. It's a home server.
It's just 2 different usages of "NAS" for different contexts.
In a business/enterprise environment, "NAS" is a more constrained definition of a single-purpose rack that only does storage duties.
However, in a home environment, "NAS" is a fuzzier definition to also include running "apps" like Home Assistant, Plex/Jellyfish media, or webcam video analysis. Either in containers or vms. Both the vendors Synology/QNAP/UGREEN and the consumers use "NAS" in this looser definition. If you go out on Google search or Amazon to search for a "home server" to buy, you will get "NAS appliances" as the results. This happens because a NAS in a home usage has plenty of idle CPU leftover to run extra apps that's not strictly just storage. Buying a 2nd computer to run apps just to satisfy the NAS to remain as a "pure" NAS is a waste of money.
Similar situation to "routers". Business/enterprise routers are single purpose. But home routers from the ISP are fuzzier definitions. They also include a DHCP service, a firewall, and a Wi-Fi access point. Maybe the home versions are not "true pure routers" in the official OSI 7-layer sense. Ok, but home users still call them "routers".
Home server is a perfectly fine term for that. NAS brands show up on Google/Amazon searches because they're cross-advertising, just like how for a while "Bing" would be the top advertisement when you searched for "Google".
You also can invert the relationship and run a NAS on a physical home server. My storage solution is a JBOD ("Just a bunch of disks") attached to a Proxmox virtualization host, where my home server runs as a VM inside Proxmox and then exposes selected directories via Samba to the home network. There's no second computer, I'm just running ~5 of them on one physical server. But by doing this, I get some isolation where if I've downloaded a questionable file, I can quarantine and inspect it (and roll back to a VM checkpoint if it compromises the machine) before I unleash it on the non-technical users of my home network.
I suppose it's like how nobody ever calls each other on a "phone" any more but we still call them "phones".
We just need to backronym the shortcut to make somewhat redundant name of "network attached server"
Just call it a home server.
I don't mind too much that a NAS runs file-sharing-oriented software as a bonus feature - if it can run Samba why can't it run Immich? But when you start using it for compute tasks it's not a storage box any more by definition. And that would be a more advanced extra feature whereas the basic functionality of a storage box is always storage.
Exactly! But don’t let the terminology bog you down. There is no market for single purpose (exclusively NAS, exclusively router, etc.) specialized devices outside of enterprise.
We call it a NAS like we call the general purpose computer in our pockets a “phone”. Or the home server that connects to our ISP a “router”.
You’re splitting hairs for no purpose
I think we can all agree that "NAS" for consumers is a marketing term, like "atomic clock". Anyone who works in an office with a NAS may come to admire its functions, and want the same experience at home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetApp
When I think of NAS, I think of Network Appliance. Even in the mid-90s they were already well-known as the makers of the most formidable turnkey NAS that an enterprise could have. They are so awesome and specialized that I never even worked near one. Their systems were called "filers" and they have proprietary filesystems with proprietary kernels and CLI, that present with an NFS interface, among other things. The Filers are blazingly fast and ultra-high-capacity.
You missed the point the author really complains about: soldered in memory chips create a single point of failure.
What you quoted needs to be seen in the context of what author calls "increasing media demands". I.e. the author believes that while the way the system is configured might be OK today, it won't be OK in the future.
Memory chips failing to me sounds like extremely bizarre fear. Memory has been extremely reliable for long time now. It is much more likely any other component on same mainboard failing than memory.
It still makes it a single point of failure...
Every single component in NAS which breaking stops operation is single point of failure. So should those all too be socket mounted?
> That's not a NAS anymore, that's a full server. I think of a NAS as "low-power computer with lots of storage attached"
I disagree. And we can at least discuss whether a NAS that doesn't have ECC is that much of a NAS or not.
I'd take an old Xeon server with 64 GB of ECC memory, run its CPU in powersave mode, and slap TrueNAS (with ZFS) on it any day over buying a dedicated NAS.
YMMV but actual professional server gear, with ECC memory, is to me more of a NAS than a consumer NAS.
And nothing forces you to run a "full server": you can dedicate a real server to be only a NAS and slap the lowest consuming Xeon on it, which moreover you can run with a powersaving CPU governor.
Slap a 10 Gbit/s ethernet NIC in it and call it a day.
It shall be more reliable too.
You can of course cosplay with a consumer NAS but the real thing is better.
P.S: mine is a HP Z440 with a 14-cores Xeon (so a workstation, not a server: the advantage is that it's totally quiet)
That's pretty mental.
Those Xeon E5's are 50w at idle, plus 10w for the 10Gb Ethernet, before you add any storage. A core 3 N300 is 1/10 of the power usage, for ~85% of the performance. Integrity at the filesystem level is required _anyway_ but if you want ECC ram, there's a bunch of AMD processors with similar power usage.
Just slap some solar panels on it!
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
There’s a handful of these projects about. You’d need a moderate battery but it’s just about doable!
It's easy to build one yourself. Just don't buy from vendors if you can't run your own software. It's that simple.
I've run two NAS appliances for 15+ years now, and never had to worry about any of this, because I just run good old Community Linux or BSD on it.
I can plug whatever PCIe card I want, as much storage as I want and from whom I want.
I built my own NAS, just Ubuntu+ZFS using an old PC I had and it works great. Don't know why people are so crazy about buying prebuilt NASes.
Why wouldn't they be? No fiddling, super compact form factor, (usually) far superior energy efficiency, maybe phone apps, did I mention no fiddling?
Also, the form factor!
No fiddling is definitely not a primary point. If one has both valuable or large amounts of data fiddling is inevitable. Nothing I have seen in retail markets is at a level of chromecast or phone setup or TV setup.
And often not only the price is high but poor reliability.
It is amazing that no one spoke about security in any of the child comments of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131785
Of course no fiddling is a primary point. That’s probably _the main point_. Sure you need _some_ configuration/setup, but it’s in a completely different ballpark to a custom built solution.
which brand? Anytime you have data locally it is lot of work. There is a reason people go to Google drive or even proton drive etc for that reason. If you can do that initial setup then DIY is not worse. Yes, all these plug-n-play give a false sense of security. One of the RAID drives is failing - no one knows.
Your definition of fiddling is maybe wrong. Not everyone is Linus S or Jeff geerling to look for that exact DDR stick etc. Get a resonable laptop or mini PC with 2 x drives. Done. Even windows drive share.
storage of data long-term of course to many segments of a market needs to be seamless and safe feeling, comforting even. To slap a brand on the side of a NAS that is complex and causes grandma to lose the entire family photo history that you scanned for a few summers after your uncle did research for decades - well, that's not great for repeat sales, right?
Why are you comparing a laptop to a NAS?
Believe me, you don't want a NAS at a chromecast level. Chromecasts are designed to be user friendly and hide a lot of settings. That wouldn't be a problem if the things worked at least. I can't even count how many times I've had to reset a chromecast because something broke and wasn't fixable.
A casual user would never buy a NAS at all, since most prefer the ease of something like iCloud or Google. If you buy a NAS you often have a specific reason to (too much data, needing to be able to reach a speed to work off of it, security...) and then the fiddeling becomes an advantage I feel. Yes it's a bit more effort, but you can get something that actually does what you want to instead of what the manufacturer thinks that you want it to do.
But form factor and energy efficiency may be helped by some of the changes that producers are doing.
Why complain about those, then?
Diy is still possible. Looks like nas is becoming more specialized.
I suspect the energy efficiency correlates with how old it is -- modern silicon in laptops is amazing. I doubt a new PC would take up 45W like this i7 7700k-powered one I've had for years.
This "no fiddling" could be the single entire counterpoint to the article and hacker culture in general. All the problems stem from "consumer wants no fiddling".
I think it's a little more nuanced. Most people cannot fiddle (with PCs). They would have to learn to, first. Does this mean they deserve to have shit shoved down their throats? No. However, they are very vulnerable, and companies want to capitalize on this fact.
Hackers (whatever kind) are just one portion of the total populace. Others deserve genuinely good products, too. And maybe sometimes even a hacker wants to take a break. ;-)
> Most people cannot fiddle (with PCs). They would have to learn to, first. Does this mean they deserve to have shit shoved down their throats?
I can fiddle perfectly well. I do it all day at work, with workstations, servers and HPC. I can already scratch that itch with much nicer than I will be ever able to buy myself. But I am not spending 1 hour more than I need to for my NAS at home, life is too short and I also like to have other hobbies. To the point that yes, I do spend a bit more for convenience and niceness.
> And maybe sometimes even a hacker wants to take a break. ;-)
Exactly.
Yeah the compact form factor and energy efficiency were the strongest point for me.
I setup one on an old pc 4 years ago freebsd zfs, literally an hour of maintenance over the course of 4 years now with ai anyone can do it.
Its the maintenance and details that kill your NAS.
You will probably rely on it for 10 years at least, so building your NAS means committing to maintaining it in the long term, you have to be sure this is something you will uphold.
Also while setting up your NAS initially is definitely doable, there are a trillion little things to get right and make sure won't bite you later on (scrubble, etc).
All these things compounds if the NAS is not just for you, but your wife, kids, family, etc. Now it becomes your responsibility that all these precious data and photos entrusted to you are 100% safe for the decades to come.
But are these off-the-shelf solutions actually supported for ten years? And since they're usually bought for "easy remote connectivity" and whatnot, that's rather important. Bonus points for updates typically being installed automatically, so people won't even think to check whether it's still updated or not.
I have a NAS made from a 15-year-old computer, with standard parts. It can saturate a gigabit link over WireGuard, so it's good enough for my needs. I installed the latest Linux kernel on it the other day. And it doesn't have random unknown stuff calling home. Since it runs ZFS and scrubs regularly, I'm quite confident the data on it is still in good shape.
I ran a Synology DS418play for 8-9 years. It got OS and security updates throughout that time. I recently replaced it with a TrueNAS setup because I needed a dramatic capacity increase, but otherwise it would still be supported.
Almost all off-the-shelf consumer grade NAS appliances are running unmaintainable OS yocto builds already 2 years out of support, and a list of CVE under active exploitation.
The only really functional OSS NAS exception for small offices is the CephFS builds from https://www.45drives.com , and that is because of included support services. =3
As some kind of cosmic karma for making my smug comment, one of my metadata mirror vdevs died this morning while my wife was doing a big transfer.
> All these things compounds if the NAS is not just for you, but your wife, kids, family, etc. Now it becomes your responsibility that all these precious data and photos entrusted to you are 100% safe for the decades to come.
A NAS is not a backup? It's hot storage.
I have a NAS but I backup my photos on AWS in S3 Deep Glacier. It costs me less than $1 a month for 500GB of pictures. That's a backup.
If it is secondary place to store and has some archiving/delete protection it is a backup.
If it is only place you store your data sure, you need another option to backup the NAS itself
That means the one you buy probably also doesn't get those things right.
Most have developed abstractions to reduce platform and service specific dependency:
https://github.com/rclone/rclone
From a maintenance perspective, one must not assume a NAS is a backup, but rather a high-bandwidth local/VPN file share.
* maids unplug equipment to vacuum offices (yes, this does really happen.)
* drives fail eventually, bit-rot is a thing, and filesystems evolve over time
* hardware specific features will always become a problem eventually. No one will check a degraded RAID/ZFS setup without service telemetry.
Practical options:
* sshfs + JBOD mount is fine for most home win11/bsd/linux/macOS/iOS/android users, as simple things have less failure modes and less time-cost to repair.
* fault tolerant systems like CephFS are usually too complex for home users. However, https://www.45drives.com offers a support option for small offices.
* ZFS has a lot of tradeoffs, and most people don't use the better key features (auto-snap-shotting and docker/VM deduplication.) In some cases even F2FS will also work fine, and probably last a bit longer with consumer flash drives.
* I agree the IT support issue with distros like TrueNAS or openmediavault becomes a popularity contest over what features are supported long-term.
It is often better to use a generic OpenBSD or Debian OS installation, and run the rclone network share abstractions on PC/Mac clients. Android and iPhone both have sftp clients for auto media backups over router VPN as well..
Lightning always wins every argument, an offsite VPN to remote file-backup is usually wise. =3
Hot-swappable, lockable drive bays with individual LED indicators. Needing more SATA ports than PCs typically come with. Features like auto-shutdown on USP failure that work out of the box. NICs with more than 1 Gbps. Lower power usage.
Maybe power efficiency?
And simplicity. And cost vs suitability for purpose. And form factor. And vendor support for the unit.
Jank ass recycled pcs and expensive, overbuilt diy rigs simply don’t even belong in the same conversation.
Situation on market is very simple to explain: People spending months in 8-5 jobs to save money to buy HW don't bother to spend few minutes to make research on what they're buying.
I have Ugreen DXP4800 plus NAS with 10-core i5-1235u and 32GB RAM, 10GBit LAN for price of what people pay for Synology with 4-core low power Ryzen 1500 and 8GB RAM and 2,5GBit LAN.
And if I wanted to save money, I would buy some older workstation for pennies with hell lot of GB ECC's, lots of caddy's add extenion cards for NVMe.
i did that, and really wish i bought something , mostly because i have like 4 hhds just lying in the bottom of the case
My old case was a big workstation one with 10 drive bays already. Definitely preferable to having them loose
I bought a plastic tower for disks which let's me have 10 disks with some space between them. I then bought some Artic fans and attached them with tape to the 'tower'. Then I used a 11 years old optiplex 990 as Debian zfs connected to 8 of the disks, and I have 2 spares which I'll be able to use when the others die.
Performance is great. I could do it because I was given those disks for free, with plenty of ours on each of them.
Several hardware generations back, my old 4x160GB raid5 had two drives on the bottom of the case, held on by screws going through holes I drilled in the outer wall of the case.
These days I managed to snag a deal on a Supermicro 846. I'm still settling into it, the main thing that concerns me is being able to suck enough air through the drive bays without making a lot of noise. My previous incarnation used some iStar toolless drive bays. I've learned to appreciate hot-swap bays, mainly for only having to do the cabling once.
For me, it was laziness. While I have the skills to built one from parts, I just wanted a big drive in an aesthetically pleasing box. I didn't want a project. I wanted something small and somewhat rugged. So I got a synology 5-bay almost seven years ago and have never looked back. It lives beside my UPS and wifi router in a small tower, all objects I expect to "just work" for months on end without any attention.
My AI rig ... that is a project. (After a kernel update, one of my GPUs has disappeared. Fixing that will be a project for my next day off.) I don't want my NAS to ever become a weekend project.
Power consumption?
>using an old PC I had and it works great. Don't know why people are so crazy about buying prebuilt NASes.
The problem is the "old pc" is typically a desktop-class cpu which is very power hungry. (~100 watts). And to make things worse, the older cpu has slower performance that doesn't justify the extra watts it consumes.
For 17+ years, I used a 2008 era Intel DX58SO motherboard + Core i7 920 in a full size Silverstone tower case as my NAS. It originally started with 1.5 TB drives and I just kept upgrading the drives all the way up to 16 TB. It worked ok and was reliable so I was never interested in turnkey NAS appliance like Synology, etc. I also wanted to install my own os, plus recycle/reuse/repurpose philosophy, and not be shackled by a proprietary NAS ... yada yada yada. The big problem with re-using my old PC is that at idle, it consumed 125 watts.
Electricity isn't 11 cents per kWh like it was 17 years ago. It's now 21c/kWh -- and will keep going up because of AI, oil prices, etc.
Last month, I did a lot of research to reduce the power usage and ended up buying a UGREEN DXP4800 Pro NAS appliance. UGREEN lets you install your own os and it uses a laptop-class cpu (much better performance specs than Synology) which is much more power efficient. At idle, it consumes just 25 watts. Also, the Intel i3-1315U in the UGREEN has a Geekbench score of 2124 which beats the i7 920 of 450. So 4x the performance while using 1/5th the power usage!
I briefly considered "upgrading" my DX58SO/i7-920 to another old pc (2014 era) X99/i7-5820K. That's slightly more power efficient of ~80 watts idle. However, running ffmpeg to convert videos makes it jump to ~180w! The UGREEN can do the same ffmpeg conversion with better performance and yet it only increases to ~45 watts.
Another unexpected bonus of lower power usage is that my server room temperature is noticeably less warm, and the lower power UGREEN gets 3x the runtime on the APC battery backup when there's a power outage. The UGREEN did cost $700 but the savings on the electricity bill will recover that in about 4 years.
I also like the UGREEN toolless hard drive sleds. The old Silverstone tower hd sleds required screws. I also like the smaller footprint. The NAS appliance was a total quality-of-life improvement.
The only thing I "lost" from the old tower setup was the CD/DVD drive bay. But I don't rip discs anymore so I that doesn't matter. If I really really wanted to, I can hook up a DVD drive to the UGREEN via a SATA-to-USB adapter but I hope to never buy physical media again so I don't expect that will happen.
There's an allure to re-using a "free" old PC as a NAS and there's also the pride of a DIY storage solution. However, that mindset also makes one overlook the negatives of that setup. Sometimes, "free" items actually cost more money.
I got a UGREEN DXP6800 about two weeks ago on which I installed FreeBSD, and was just noticing today how slow the USB is when I saw this article mentioning a possible explanation (like ten times slower than when I plug the same external SSD into another machine). Have you noticed USB bandwidth issues in your setup or is it likely just some misconfiguration on my part?
I believe that the target market for this equipment is small / medium size enterprises that need a solution for local storage of whatever information they process in their day-to-day operations. So, they won't have a system administrator on staff. They would rather try to assemble their computer system themselves or pay someone once to put things together. In this context, having a pre-built component that one can plug into the larger system is what customers would be looking for.
It's similar to the days when buying a PC would involve either finding a friend who could read the specs from the computer shop, make a list and assemble the PC once all the components are bought, or you'd buy a build from the shop (with some extra markup for the service). And today most PC users have moved on to laptops if not just even phones.
Most people will use what's commercially available. Today, most NAS users won't have an old PC case with HDD mounts laying around. They will have to buy something, and that something will likely be a pre-built NAS, the kind this article is written about. And similar to how laptops are a form of enshitification of desktops, these NAS boxes are too. Removing modularity drives the price down, but also doesn't allow the users the ability to repair and to study the product they own.
People aren't "crazy" about buying pre-built NAS boxes. It's what there is, they buy what's available.
The cookie preference pop up on this site is unacceptable - 1 click to accept all cookies, SEVEN clicks to reject all cookies.
I don't see these because I use the, 'I still don't care about cookies' add-on.
I also use, 'Cookie Auto-Delete', which deletes a sites cookies as soon as I close the tab, unless I specify to keep them, which I do on sites I want to remain logged into.
It surprises me people put up with these annoyances, or ads either.
> The cookie preference pop up on this site is unacceptable - 1 click to accept all cookies, SEVEN clicks to reject all cookies.
Yeah, that kinda dark pattern / malicious compliance junk ought to be straight up illegal. At least on par with "contempt of court" type situations. Sure, they may (just barely) comply with the absolute letter of the law, but the spirit of the law is surely being very much abused and deeply disrespected there.
> Yeah, that kinda dark pattern / malicious compliance junk ought to be straight up illegal.
It is illegal.
> To comply with the regulations governing cookies under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive you must:
> [...]
> - Allow users to access your service even if they refuse to allow the use of certain cookies
> - Make it as easy for users to withdraw their consent as it was for them to give their consent in the first place.
7 clicks is not as easy as one "accept all", violating the last point. Not allowing you to dismiss the banner and access the site violates the other point.
The real problem is enforcement, unfortunately.
I have seen a few occasional sites that are even worse than this one.. Not only don't you get a reject all, you get two classes of settings, the default "types", and "trusted partners", and for trusted partners, about a third of them have what's called "legitimate interest" turned on, which means "we legitimately think we can share your data with this people after leading you to believe we haven't, and that's ok", and there are a hundred or more partners you have to scroll through and disable this for
> Yeah, that kinda dark pattern / malicious compliance junk ought to be straight up illegal.
It is not malicious compliance
It is not complying to the law
Law clearly states how the reject path should look and they are NOT in compliance, just nobody sued them yet
And after a few minutes of reading a pop-up shows for joining their mailing list.
There is no mention of the usual enshittyfication, instead their complaint is that things look generic and that is the last of the list. I would say this is a feature.
The points about locking and dumbing down products are well researched, true and worrisome.
I’ve bought a NAS after watching NASCompares a few years ago, and also an ethernet adapter. His videos are nice. Talking about enshittyfication on an enshittyfied site misses the mark a little bit. “Legitimate interest”… lol.
And if you scroll down you get a popup to ask for your email for their newsletter. The irony of an article about enshittification on a site that is clearly enshittified is strong.
Not to excuse the site, but you should really be using an ad blocker that takes care of that. I see nothing, neither on mobile nor desktop.
I don't share the author's view of the OSs becoming copycats of eachother and not that specialized.
Truth to be told, a NAS is the perfect place to have your home server. You can have both your applications and data on the same device and avoid having to build a lab just to have nextcloud or some other utility self hosted. However, to achieve this, the OS must become more similar to a normal linux distro, for better or for worse
If it's a home server, it's not a NAS. A NAS is defined as a storage box. I also do not run Immich on the ARM controller of my hard drive.
He didn't make the point clear, but the recent OSes are just trying to be Synology DSM copycats.
funny that you think Synology is a leader here where only thing they lead is bad customer practices and CVEs
While I don't disagree with the individual complaints, I've seen this niche go from running scuffed OSes on underpowered Synologies or building DIY NASes with limited case options like the Node 304, to multiple hot swap NASes running great x86 chips (and memory slots) and many DIY build paths including 3D printed cases. Things probably suck for those reliant on Synology, but I'm stoked for this hobby, especially when Minisforum/Aoostar to start pumping out Wildcat Lake stuff.
I think the biggest issue is hard drive (or SSD) costs currently. I got a UNAS 8 Pro a few months ago and it still sits empty. It's my own fault, I should have priced out the drives but I was buying Unifi equipment for a new house and wanted to try our their NAS offering.
I just looked and the hard drives I've bought before are currently >3x the price I last paid. I know I'm not telling anyone anything new but I'm just praying my existing drives hold out since replacing them (even 1) if they fail will cost a small fortune.
I use a mini amd pc with a disk bay. Surprisingly it is cheaper than many nas, and much more configurable (from memory to ssd) and have a much better gpu.
The only challenge would be finding a very good cable that stays solidly.
Given the (non-) responsiveness of the page, I’m going with they focused too much on “storage” and not enough on “network attached.”
Haha touché! Hope it starts working soon so I can verify this statement.
The website is also so hilariously enshittified that the “enshittification” text barely peeked through the ads and other popups.
FYI the article is unreachable. Clicking the link results in an erroneous "you are on a black list! Email admin@nascompares.com if you think this is a mistake." message.
Are there any good out of the box NAS options?
Given the article's bullet points, I would think the UGreen options bypass the first six... the following bullet points are just general market pricing issues and other issues outside of the NAS manufacturer's control.
EDIT: OK I see he doesn't like the onboard eMMC - fair enough.
I paid $280 for a DXP 2800, and was fortunate enough to get drives before the recent price increases. But I've only got 8GB and missed my window for an inexpensive jump to 16GB. Still it isn't having performance issues for my needs.
Serves as NAS, media server (Jellyfin), photo server (Immich). I've also dabbled with some web serving via pre-made docker images but haven't taken it very far.
Thank you. I don’t really sweat the hardware being modular as much as I do security and privacy.
I use UniFi Nas Pro - it is just a NAS, not a home server. I have it directly connected to my home server with a 10GB SFP+ link and it works super well.
Interesting thanks.
Synology is truly dead to me now. I used their stuck mostly happily since my first DS412+ way back when. But this thing with locking down features to require their own branded drives is madness. No way, no how.
Last year they tried restricting the OS from creating new volumes unless all drives in it were Synology branded. People tore them a new asshole in the press and they backed away from that.
Now their newest DSM 7.4 release features a new smart storage system with postprocessing deduplication and compression. I tried to enable that on my own volume for testing, but nope: it only works on “pure Synology” volumes.
Fuck that. Synology, get this out of your damn heads. I will never, never buy your stupid, overpriced drives. It won’t happen. Never. And on top of the ludicrous price premium, if one breaks, how do I can get a replacement urgently? If my IronWolf blows up, I can drive over to Central Computer and come home with another just like it. Amazon has few Synology drives in stock and none of them are large. When I have a dead drive, the last thing I’m gonna want to do is go on an urgent quest for a replacement unicorn.
I’m done with ‘em. It’s clear they’re fixated on this stupid idea and aren’t going to give it up. Well, good luck with that and your remaining customer base, which no longer includes me.
I didn't see them mention anything about adding features that aren't strictly about storing files... things like containers and virtual machines...
The term got enshittified. Compare the definition over time via Wikipedia. Technically, NAS by the original definition can not host anything but a filesystem. It is simply free disk space, a SAN with a GUI. Anything you do to that disk space does not change what it is, until you start adding OS features, monitoring features, Wi-Fi, etc. Now it no longer is NAS - it is a server. We did this to ourselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage#Descr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Network-attached_...
On 1.4 "Integration of Fixed Low-Capacity OS Drives"
eMMC bad because un-upgradeable and/or repairable. m.2 bad because if it wasn't there a user could put a big storage device there.
I'm not even sure what the author wants here?
I don't think it is that bad. Especially Ubnt just released their UNAS Pro. ( Although only comes with BTRFS on consumer and ZFS only on the Enterprise. )
I still think Apple should have bring their AirPort Express and Time Capsule back. Instead they wanted everyone to be on their iCloud subscription.
Yes because most people don’t have an off site backup strategy.
> I still think Apple should have bring their AirPort Express and Time Capsule back.
But for the love of God, please fix Time Machine.
> Software Homogenization and Interface Uniformity
While I do prefer the DIY route, I'd struggle to call that "enshitified". Vensors consolidated around solutions because they work reliably, without reinventing the wheel. I'd much rather a NAS be a lightweight wrapper around a proven and easily maintained base than try to over extend themselves and jerry-rig some abomination.
And for customers who rely on them it means they can shift brands and still feel basically just at home.
You can build your own a lot more cheaply now especially if you only want storage. There’s some canned distros and control panels for it.
If the storage doesn’t need to be fast a newer Pi can do it with USB-C drives.
An old Intel Mac mini from eBay makes a good home file server too and is compatible with everything. Get a thunderbolt drive bay.
Speaking of enshitification, this blog is an unreadable mess of ads and popups. As fast as I was in I was out.
Yep. On mobile it was basically impossible to read. 2/3 of the page was covered in ads and pop ups. I figure if they don’t care about the readers’ experience then I don’t care to try to read their content.
I am rather surprised that there's no well-supported OSS way to get full disk encryption + ZFS + automatic SSD/HDD tiering or at least caching.
FDE with Secure Boot on Linux is a minefield.
ZFS doesn't do tiering.
Sadly on Windows tiering is also expensive (requires Server editions).
Just last month I bought a HP Micro server (N54L) from 2012, two second hand 4TB drives, 16GB of DDR3, and a 2.5GbE dual port network card. All in, that was about £180. I may shell out another £30 or so for a half depth, low profile graphics card that can support a couple of transcoding streams.
Reading the article, I don't regret it. Part of what puts me off the regular NAS market is price, but also things like non redundant boot options, ambiguity about whether or not I can install my own OS, and the lack of slots. The NAS form factor itself is off-putting because if you're buying something that isn't Synology or whatever, the RAM tax is still there.
Maybe I'm a cheapskate who will have slightly higher opex, but old hardware does seem to be pretty much as good as new hardware, to me.
That's what I was running for the best part of 8 years until last year. Was very reliable.
In the end I just cleaned out all my shit and got rid of it. Less is more.
Expensive drives have become such a pain. Maybe five years from now, if supply meets demand, I just wish I can afford a 1PB all-flash NAS. I really don't want to hear noise and I wish data centres would release their used supply on market. I will put backup on HDDs.
Soldered RAM and novel format hardware is a pain point. Macbook storage upgrade needs special custom hardware. Synology still doesn't allow third party HDDs in their extension units. NAS devices are truly a fantastic category on its own. My data remains local, while also allowing me to use it as a server for my workloads.
> I wish data centres would release their used supply on market.
They do: https://serverpartdeals.com/
Haven’t used them myself, but afair Wendel (Level1Techs) mentioned them at some point.
Server Part Deals is really good since they test the drives themselves. But even the used drives are on the verge of being unaffordable now. They increased the price of their 28TB re-certified drive last month by $120.
Well, you can take a walk on the wild side and for whatever reason this aggregator has a particularly robust set of sorting categories when it comes to hard drives. https://www.saleturbo.com/techdeals/
Caveat emptor, of course.
The primary problem is the cost of drives now IMO.
I've got 16tb drives (in a usb-c DAS, not NAS), and at 2-3 the price that I bought them for I don't plan to replace them when they go.
The data will just be lost, like tears in rain.
I've always had a relatively bad experience with NAS hardware. Not necessarily due to anything the hardware manufacturer could have done. I have lost entire enclosures to lightning strikes on more than one occasion. Everyone thinks their IT skills are hot shit until they wake up to a closet full of burned hardware in the morning. It is quite a humbling experience if you've never been through it before. There isn't any kind of semiconductor process tech, file system design or RAID configuration that can save you from this. An off-site backup is the only thing that would count, which brings me to my next point.
These days I just store my files in S3. Whether or not this actually costs me more money becomes a very irrelevant shade of grey once I factor in the value of my time and sanity. I prefer having the capability to store and retrieve large files, not spending time maintaining this capability. This is also my "off-site" backup. I am paying for my operational NAS and its backup effectively at the same time. No one doing DIY is remotely close to 99.999999999% durability, even with all the kings horses and men put together.
I often see this urgency with total control pushing tech people into the very systems of oppression they seek to avoid. Putting your bits in some blob storage provider like AWS is not "losing the game" unless you frame it that way in your head. You can frame it as "getting one over on the bad guys" if you are a little bit clever with how you approach the problem. You can compel Amazon host any kind of bits with a sprinkle of AES256 on the client. I've been a customer with them for over 15 years and not once have they rug pulled me. I've never seen a NAS-style solution survive that long without intervention.
I don't know dude I am running a NAS for my home, it has taken minimal maintenance. The main benefit is it's local on my LAN, so speed and latency are dictated by the drives and my switch not whatever is happening outside my home.
> Everyone thinks their IT skills are hot shit until they wake up to a closet full of burned hardware in the morning. It is quite a humbling experience if you've never been through it before.
> I've been a customer with them for over 15 years and not once have they rug pulled me.
I actually tend to agree with the thrust of your argument, but how is your view of getting your account banned different than others' view of managing a NAS?
> I have lost entire enclosures to lightning strikes on more than one occasion. Everyone thinks their IT skills are hot shit until they wake up to a closet full of burned hardware in the morning. It is quite a humbling experience if you've never been through it before. There isn't any kind of semiconductor process tech, file system design or RAID configuration that can save you from this.
A power surge protector?
I have a NAS at home with ZFS snapshots and nightly offsite backups. What's so hard about that, or how is it less durable than your S3 solution?
Nightly? what happens in between and how many different sites? What happens if your Internet goes down one night? How many parity drives do you have? Will the array survive replacing a drive or will another one die during the sync will you lose data if that happens?
S3 takes replication seriously to a professional level, when you upload a file to S3 the chance of s3 losing it is capped by the chance of a civilization killing asteroid hitting the earth.
Yes. Nothing, one site. The backup gets taken the next night. One. Yes. Yes.
What happens if your drive dies just as you're uploading the file to S3? Why are we comparing the durability of S3 to the reliability of my Internet connection, instead of to the durability of rsync.net?
How often are you testing those backups? What kind of monitoring do you have? Do you pay attention to it? Skip any of those and it's just a prayer.
They're zfs snapshots, assuming you're actually taking them, a send/recv shouldn't cause any problems... (ignoring the hole_birth and encryption bugs from the 0.6.x days - to my knowledge, they should both be resolved by now)
Every day, healthchecks.io, yes.
How much do you pay for offsite backups? How durable are they?
I think around $50/yr for around a TB? It's rsync.net, so I think very durable.
the answer is always "durable enough", purely because the chance of 2 independent backup copies failing at same time is vanishingly small
I built my "NAS", which is just a normal computer with no GPU but 3 hard-drives in RAID 5, for $400 + storage cost. It is much more powerful that any NAS, even thousands of dollars ones, I'm not too sure at what cost (power consumption maybe?).
I don't understand why people would go with an actual pre-built NAS from a manufacturer over my approach. It's always a complete rip-off.
Here's my single story with NAS in 10+ years of software development.
A client had a NAS for their SaaS startup. Disks were having issues. The NAS was a prosumer product that was connected via USB. Had some SATA to SATA cable shipped by Amazon to the garage/colocation facility which basically meant removing the NAS and connecting the disks straight to the motherboard.
Issue solved.
It seems like one of those tarpit product categories that you are just better off by skipping completely, like ORMs, MCPs or reverse proxy HTTP servers.
“NAS” itself is an enshitification
nitpicker here: enshitified or enshittified?
Maybe they're irish
Published on a site that is enshittified with ads and nags, how ironic
I can easily accept that arguments like "an Iphone is just a computer" are often overly reductionist.
But people justifying much of this segmentation?
Come ON, any NAS is just a server. What are people DOING here?
Unfortunately an iPhone is less than a computer due to all the restrictions from Apple.
Soldered RAM being bad is an opinion, not a fact.
I’ve seen way too many RAM slots go bad.
Smart people always get the highest configuration in computers, unless they know they’ll never need some of the resources and can tolerate a lower option.
> Smart people always get the highest configuration in computers
Smart rich people, maybe. Have you got the money for extra RAM right now?
It's implied. Truly smart people manage to become affluent.
The legendary wealth of Paul Erdős was indeed largely of legend alone.
We've all what a terrible job LLMs do in some problems. But they are doing well at burning down Erdos's list of problems. Perhaps mathematicians aren't a good measure of "truly smart".
If you're seriously taking that angle on comparison .. how well are they doing on generating interesting and challenging Erdős like problems?
Oh, not that seriously, but it makes me wonder!
You've seen RAM slots go bad? DIMMs can also fail!
I'd much rather replace a bad stick than a whole motherboard/device.
For real. Reballing a chip is hard!
> Smart people always get the highest configuration in computers, unless they know they’ll never need some of the resources and can tolerate a lower option.
So if I'm buying a server and it's available with anything between 8GB and 4TB of RAM (the price difference being ~$70,000), and my current use only requires 8GB, how much should I get? There is a 50% chance the project fails and I never need more than 8GB and a 50% chance it succeeds and then I'll need 64GB or 512GB or 4TB depending on how well it goes.
Not everyone lives in SanFra, my man, and can afford to throw a salary on a lab.