Consumer NASes should take advantage of physical presence. There should be better functionality for a user that is standing next to the thing.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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”.

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.

> 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)

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!

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.

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.

Maybe power efficiency?

i did that, and really wish i bought something , mostly because i have like 4 hhds just lying in the bottom of the case

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

Maybe they're irish

Unfortunately an iPhone is less than a computer due to all the restrictions from Apple.

> Smart people always get the highest configuration in computers

Smart rich people, maybe. Have you got the money for extra RAM right now?

You've seen RAM slots go bad? DIMMs can also fail!

I'd much rather replace a bad stick than a whole motherboard/device.

> 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.