So I had this QNAP TS451+ sitting and gathering dust after a move. I had no interest in dealing with the terrible QNAP OS on it and wanted to do something open

So I had this QNAP TS451+ sitting and gathering dust after a move. I had no interest in dealing with the terrible QNAP OS on it and wanted to do something open source. The only somewhat difficult part was preserving data from the old disks as QNAP has custom extensions to LVM or MDRAID which work nowhere else. So there were a few back and forth of removing a few disks from the pool, rebooting to a normal linux, formatting them without the custom garbage, booting back and copying over. In the end I decided to go with NixOS as I've already used it on my laptop/desktop for about 5 years. I also wanted a modern CoW file system and went with bcachefs. Getting it working with NixOS takes some fiddling, especially if you also want encryption but it works. It now runs samba, matrix-synapse and soon maybe nextcloud. Not quite there yet with everything but quite happy that I went down this route. The only thing missing from the HW side is an SSD, but the box has USB3 and UAS support so I might add an external one that bcachefs can use as a faster tier.