What to Look for in a NAS?
This week I finished setting up Arch Linux (It felt so good to nuke Windows 11 off my laptop!) and GrapheneOS for my new Pixel phone.
I am interested in getting a NAS for multiple purposes such as accessing files, hosting a small website, and to upload security camera footage to name a few.
Is there a particular brand to buy? I'm basically illiterate when it comes to networks aside from what an IP is and what DNS is. Any suggestions for books and reading material is greatly appreciated. It feels liberating to know more than I did before with tech!
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Whatever you do, don't buy a QNAP. I have no idea whether Synology is similar, but I am having a hell of a time recovering data off my dead QNAP TS-453 Pro because they make it almost impossible to repair without specialized tooling and the on-disk format is using a custom version of LVM that's incompatible with standard Linux. The reason why it died was because of a manufacturing defect in the onboard Intel J1900 chip that QNAP knew about, didn't do a recall for, and refused to provide proper support for. The disks themselves are fine, I am just forced to buy another QNAP just to access the data. After this experience, I swore off using turnkey NAS boxes. If your data is stored in a proprietary box that's unrepairable and using a disk format that's non-standard, that data is not safe.
Now I have a self-built DIY NAS that I've setup with Arch Linux and OpenZFS and I am pretty happy with the results. Sure, going SSD over HDD is an expensive choice, but given that I had to replace each hard drive in my QNAP 2-3 times each over the span of 7 years, I think the cost balances out and the extra performance is sooo worth it (80MB/s vs 700-1000MB/s).
Exact same thing happened to me. Last time I'll buy qnap.
Sucks that this also happened to you. How did you end up recovering your data?
The same way. I had to buy a compatible qnap replacement.
Yikes! I'm going to have to watch out for that. I don't know if I can just jerry-rig together some HDDs into one of the RAID X configurations, but I think I want to get some that are quite a bit larger than 2TB given the amount of things I'd like to do with my NAS (File server, email server, personal website, etc). I'll do some more research, thanks for the help!