Comment by tombert
1 day ago
I always forget that these things aren't for me. My immediate thought is always immediately "just build your own NAS with a vanilla Linux box and set up Samba or something because then you can make it however you want".
But of course, if I'm someone who knows how to build a NAS and is inclined to do such a thing, then I'm sort of inherently not the kind of person that would be interested in such things and not the audience they're marketing towards, which is obviously fine.
I've been a sysadmin for decades, dealt with *nix based servers since the late 90s, yet for the most part I've used devices like Synology servers, simply because I don't want to have to manage technology to that degree at home.
I've built my own NAS when my last synology died, and I'm not sure I'll build one again. I've dealt with all sorts of issues that I just haven't had to deal with with a packaged solution, and I really just want to not think about that stuff when I'm not working.
Yes, I can absolutely do it for cheaper, better, and with more flexibility myself. Doesn't mean I actually want to.
> I really just want to not think about that stuff when I'm not working.
This is my exact attitude but I don't have decades of sysadmin experience to lean on so I'm completely lost on what approach to take setting up my first NAS.
My requirements are simple: (1) Should be plug and play (hardware + software) (2) Must support ZFS since I already set up a pool in my beefy desktop PC.
What would you recommend? I've looked into Synology's offerings and they look perfect except for the fact that they don't support ZFS only Btrfs. I clicked into this thread expecting Ubiquiti's offering would be what I want, but all I see here is hardcore enterprise gear for the prosumer crowd.
What kind of issues? I just set up a very home tier NAS setup for my home server.
Got a 4 bay usb hard drive enclosure and then just set up a btrfs raid array since my drives are all different speeds and capacities. The thing is only about as fast as a single hard drive but it does pool all the storage in to one unified storage and is way faster than google drive.
Companies are also much more inclined to spend money to solve a problem while hobbyists are much more likely to get enjoyment out of the process of building. I'm firmly in the latter category, having built a rather robust ZFS array on NixOS with a pretty gnarly NVMe cache hierarchy built on LVM. It was fun to do.
I don't have the NVMe cache but I too have quite a robost ZFS array on NixOS. I feel less guilty about running it now since it is powered almost exclusively off solar in my backyard :)
I get most of my electricity from solar farms through my local utility provider!