> Yeah; once you get deep enough, you realize you can just install things yourself, configure them with Ansible, or Nix, or whatever, and have full control. I

> Yeah; once you get deep enough, you realize you can just install things yourself, configure them with Ansible, or Nix, or whatever, and have full control. I think if you've gone through the effort of setting up Ansible scripts for setting up & maintaining a NAS, you probably are not actually making a NAS anymore. Like maybe you're doing Ceph or Gluster cluster or something, which can be fun to play with. Heck, I did that with a bunch of ODROID-HC2's as well. It was fun to setup a cluster storage system. It also wasn't practical at all and at no point did it ever seriously compete with replacing my "real" NAS (which currently is Unraid, but I'd absolutely consider switching to TrueNAS in a future upgrade), since the main feature that a NAS needs to provide is uptime.