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No one capable of doing those things would have even bought one of these WD devices in the first place...

meatmanek 5y ago
I seriously considered building my own NAS based around FreeNAS (something I'm perfectly capable of doing), but then decided to go for a commercially available, low-end NAS for two reasons: 1. my tendency to scope creep on the hardware requirements meant that I was looking at a BOM that was about 3x the cost of the commercial NAS. 2. it seemed likely that I'd spend a lot of time engineering my NAS and fighting compatibility issues with e.g. Time Machine. The commercial NAS had all the features I wanted out of the box. Ultimately, I bought a low-end Synology NAS and have been pretty happy with it. I haven't been affected, and my device is still supported 7 years later, but my story could easily have turned out like these WD customers. Some of us don't want to spend our free time maintaining a NAS.
- arp242 5y ago
  > Some of us don't want to spend our free time maintaining a NAS. The issue is that, for me anyway, it's often easier/faster to just set up something myself. Most of the time it's a "configure once"-thing and then it "just works" with just the occasional updates. And if something does tend to go awry it's usually easy to diagnose and fix. If something goes wrong with one of those NAS black boxes it tends to be much more complicated. Or if I want to add $feature_x this tends to be fairly easy as well. Of course, this vastly depends on your skill and what you use it for: I don't have a mac so I never tried Time machine. My point is just that for some of us at least, "building their own" is actually done for the same reasons: I want to spend as little time on this as possible. Synology are pretty neat machines last I checked them out though, we used to sell quite a few of them (over 10 years ago). I stopped using my CentOS "NAS" when I moved a few years ago, but if I were ever to be interested in buying one I'd probably consider it as an option.

I seriously considered building my own NAS based around FreeNAS (something I'm perfectly capable of doing), but then decided to go for a commercially available, low-end NAS for two reasons: 1. my tendency to scope creep on the hardware requirements meant that I was looking at a BOM that was about 3x the cost of the commercial NAS. 2. it seemed likely that I'd spend a lot of time engineering my NAS and fighting compatibility issues with e.g. Time Machine. The commercial NAS had all the features I wanted out of the box. Ultimately, I bought a low-end Synology NAS and have been pretty happy with it. I haven't been affected, and my device is still supported 7 years later, but my story could easily have turned out like these WD customers. Some of us don't want to spend our free time maintaining a NAS.

arp242 5y ago
> Some of us don't want to spend our free time maintaining a NAS. The issue is that, for me anyway, it's often easier/faster to just set up something myself. Most of the time it's a "configure once"-thing and then it "just works" with just the occasional updates. And if something does tend to go awry it's usually easy to diagnose and fix. If something goes wrong with one of those NAS black boxes it tends to be much more complicated. Or if I want to add $feature_x this tends to be fairly easy as well. Of course, this vastly depends on your skill and what you use it for: I don't have a mac so I never tried Time machine. My point is just that for some of us at least, "building their own" is actually done for the same reasons: I want to spend as little time on this as possible. Synology are pretty neat machines last I checked them out though, we used to sell quite a few of them (over 10 years ago). I stopped using my CentOS "NAS" when I moved a few years ago, but if I were ever to be interested in buying one I'd probably consider it as an option.