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Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified

thadt 3mo ago
Given the (non-) responsiveness of the page, I’m going with they focused too much on “storage” and not enough on “network attached.”
- swipee 3mo ago
  Haha touché! Hope it starts working soon so I can verify this statement.
- solarkraft 3mo ago
  The website is also so hilariously enshittified that the “enshittification” text barely peeked through the ads and other popups.
zeafoamrun 3mo ago
I built my own NAS, just Ubuntu+ZFS using an old PC I had and it works great. Don't know why people are so crazy about buying prebuilt NASes.
- fuzzy2 3mo ago
  Why wouldn't they be? No fiddling, super compact form factor, (usually) far superior energy efficiency, maybe phone apps, did I mention no fiddling? Also, the form factor!
  - alanfranz 3mo ago
    But form factor and energy efficiency may be helped by some of the changes that producers are doing. Why complain about those, then? Diy is still possible. Looks like nas is becoming more specialized.
    - tentacleuno 3mo ago
      I suspect the energy efficiency correlates with how old it is -- modern silicon in laptops is amazing. I doubt a new PC would take up 45W like this i7 7700k-powered one I've had for years.
  - whyagaindavid 3mo ago
    No fiddling is definitely not a primary point. If one has both valuable or large amounts of data fiddling is inevitable. Nothing I have seen in retail markets is at a level of chromecast or phone setup or TV setup. And often not only the price is high but poor reliability. It is amazing that no one spoke about security in any of the child comments of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131785
    - lm2s 3mo ago
      Of course no fiddling is a primary point. That’s probably _the main point_. Sure you need _some_ configuration/setup, but it’s in a completely different ballpark to a custom built solution.
      - whyagaindavid 3mo ago
        which brand? Anytime you have data locally it is lot of work. There is a reason people go to Google drive or even proton drive etc for that reason. If you can do that initial setup then DIY is not worse. Yes, all these plug-n-play give a false sense of security. One of the RAID drives is failing - no one knows. Your definition of fiddling is maybe wrong. Not everyone is Linus S or Jeff geerling to look for that exact DDR stick etc. Get a resonable laptop or mini PC with 2 x drives. Done. Even windows drive share.
        anonreplier 3mo ago
        Why are you comparing a laptop to a NAS?
        conorcleary 3mo ago
        storage of data long-term of course to many segments of a market needs to be seamless and safe feeling, comforting even. To slap a brand on the side of a NAS that is complex and causes grandma to lose the entire family photo history that you scanned for a few summers after your uncle did research for decades - well, that's not great for repeat sales, right?
    - 3mo ago
  - poisonborz 3mo ago
    This "no fiddling" could be the single entire counterpoint to the article and hacker culture in general. All the problems stem from "consumer wants no fiddling".
    - fuzzy2 3mo ago
      I think it's a little more nuanced. Most people cannot fiddle (with PCs). They would have to learn to, first. Does this mean they deserve to have shit shoved down their throats? No. However, they are very vulnerable, and companies want to capitalize on this fact. Hackers (whatever kind) are just one portion of the total populace. Others deserve genuinely good products, too. And maybe sometimes even a hacker wants to take a break. ;-)
      - kergonath 3mo ago
        > Most people cannot fiddle (with PCs). They would have to learn to, first. Does this mean they deserve to have shit shoved down their throats? I can fiddle perfectly well. I do it all day at work, with workstations, servers and HPC. I can already scratch that itch with much nicer than I will be ever able to buy myself. But I am not spending 1 hour more than I need to for my NAS at home, life is too short and I also like to have other hobbies. To the point that yes, I do spend a bit more for convenience and niceness. > And maybe sometimes even a hacker wants to take a break. ;-) Exactly.
  - throwawayffffas 3mo ago
    I setup one on an old pc 4 years ago freebsd zfs, literally an hour of maintenance over the course of 4 years now with ai anyone can do it.
  - tym0 3mo ago
    Yeah the compact form factor and energy efficiency were the strongest point for me.
  - CamperBob2 3mo ago
    For me, "fiddling" is now the job of Claude Code. Nobody who can manage to install Claude needs to be intimidated by anything else in Linux.
- sandworm101 3mo ago
  For me, it was laziness. While I have the skills to built one from parts, I just wanted a big drive in an aesthetically pleasing box. I didn't want a project. I wanted something small and somewhat rugged. So I got a synology 5-bay almost seven years ago and have never looked back. It lives beside my UPS and wifi router in a small tower, all objects I expect to "just work" for months on end without any attention. My AI rig ... that is a project. (After a kernel update, one of my GPUs has disappeared. Fixing that will be a project for my next day off.) I don't want my NAS to ever become a weekend project.
- mcfedr 3mo ago
  i did that, and really wish i bought something , mostly because i have like 4 hhds just lying in the bottom of the case
  - zeafoamrun 3mo ago
    My old case was a big workstation one with 10 drive bays already. Definitely preferable to having them loose
    - permalac 3mo ago
      I bought a plastic tower for disks which let's me have 10 disks with some space between them. I then bought some Artic fans and attached them with tape to the 'tower'. Then I used a 11 years old optiplex 990 as Debian zfs connected to 8 of the disks, and I have 2 spares which I'll be able to use when the others die. Performance is great. I could do it because I was given those disks for free, with plenty of ours on each of them.
  - mindslight 3mo ago
    Several hardware generations back, my old 4x160GB raid5 had two drives on the bottom of the case, held on by screws going through holes I drilled in the outer wall of the case. These days I managed to snag a deal on a Supermicro 846. I'm still settling into it, the main thing that concerns me is being able to suck enough air through the drive bays without making a lot of noise. My previous incarnation used some iStar toolless drive bays. I've learned to appreciate hot-swap bays, mainly for only having to do the cabling once.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3mo ago
  Maybe power efficiency?
  - dd8601fn 3mo ago
    And simplicity. And cost vs suitability for purpose. And form factor. And vendor support for the unit. Jank ass recycled pcs and expensive, overbuilt diy rigs simply don’t even belong in the same conversation.
- Galanwe 3mo ago
  Its the maintenance and details that kill your NAS. You will probably rely on it for 10 years at least, so building your NAS means committing to maintaining it in the long term, you have to be sure this is something you will uphold. Also while setting up your NAS initially is definitely doable, there are a trillion little things to get right and make sure won't bite you later on (scrubble, etc). All these things compounds if the NAS is not just for you, but your wife, kids, family, etc. Now it becomes your responsibility that all these precious data and photos entrusted to you are 100% safe for the decades to come.
  - zeafoamrun 3mo ago
    As some kind of cosmic karma for making my smug comment, one of my metadata mirror vdevs died this morning while my wife was doing a big transfer.
  - iLoveOncall 3mo ago
    > All these things compounds if the NAS is not just for you, but your wife, kids, family, etc. Now it becomes your responsibility that all these precious data and photos entrusted to you are 100% safe for the decades to come. A NAS is not a backup? It's hot storage. I have a NAS but I backup my photos on AWS in S3 Deep Glacier. It costs me less than $1 a month for 500GB of pictures. That's a backup.
    - PunchyHamster 3mo ago
      If it is secondary place to store and has some archiving/delete protection it is a backup. If it is only place you store your data sure, you need another option to backup the NAS itself
  - vladvasiliu 3mo ago
    But are these off-the-shelf solutions actually supported for ten years? And since they're usually bought for "easy remote connectivity" and whatnot, that's rather important. Bonus points for updates typically being installed automatically, so people won't even think to check whether it's still updated or not. I have a NAS made from a 15-year-old computer, with standard parts. It can saturate a gigabit link over WireGuard, so it's good enough for my needs. I installed the latest Linux kernel on it the other day. And it doesn't have random unknown stuff calling home. Since it runs ZFS and scrubs regularly, I'm quite confident the data on it is still in good shape.
- crabbone 3mo ago
  I believe that the target market for this equipment is small / medium size enterprises that need a solution for local storage of whatever information they process in their day-to-day operations. So, they won't have a system administrator on staff. They would rather try to assemble their computer system themselves or pay someone once to put things together. In this context, having a pre-built component that one can plug into the larger system is what customers would be looking for. It's similar to the days when buying a PC would involve either finding a friend who could read the specs from the computer shop, make a list and assemble the PC once all the components are bought, or you'd buy a build from the shop (with some extra markup for the service). And today most PC users have moved on to laptops if not just even phones. Most people will use what's commercially available. Today, most NAS users won't have an old PC case with HDD mounts laying around. They will have to buy something, and that something will likely be a pre-built NAS, the kind this article is written about. And similar to how laptops are a form of enshitification of desktops, these NAS boxes are too. Removing modularity drives the price down, but also doesn't allow the users the ability to repair and to study the product they own. People aren't "crazy" about buying pre-built NAS boxes. It's what there is, they buy what's available.
- hyperbolablabla 3mo ago
  [dead]
- jasode 3mo ago
  >using an old PC I had and it works great. Don't know why people are so crazy about buying prebuilt NASes. The problem is the "old pc" is typically a desktop-class cpu which is very power hungry. (~100 watts). And to make things worse, the older cpu has slower performance that doesn't justify the extra watts it consumes. For 17+ years, I used a 2008 era Intel DX58SO motherboard + Core i7 920 in a full size Silverstone tower case as my NAS. It originally started with 1.5 TB drives and I just kept upgrading the drives all the way up to 16 TB. It worked ok and was reliable so I was never interested in turnkey NAS appliance like Synology, etc. I also wanted to install my own os, plus recycle/reuse/repurpose philosophy, and not be shackled by a proprietary NAS ... yada yada yada. The big problem with re-using my old PC is that at idle, it consumed 125 watts. Electricity isn't 11 cents per kWh like it was 17 years ago. It's now 21c/kWh -- and will keep going up because of AI, oil prices, etc. Last month, I did a lot of research to reduce the power usage and ended up buying a UGREEN DXP4800 Pro NAS appliance. UGREEN lets you install your own os and it uses a laptop-class cpu (much better performance specs than Synology) which is much more power efficient. At idle, it consumes just 25 watts. Also, the Intel i3-1315U in the UGREEN has a Geekbench score of 2124 which beats the i7 920 of 450. So 4x the performance while using 1/5th the power usage! I briefly considered "upgrading" my DX58SO/i7-920 to another old pc (2014 era) X99/i7-5820K. That's slightly more power efficient of ~80 watts idle. However, running ffmpeg to convert videos makes it jump to ~180w! The UGREEN can do the same ffmpeg conversion with better performance and yet it only increases to ~45 watts. Another unexpected bonus of lower power usage is that my server room temperature is noticeably less warm, and the lower power UGREEN gets 3x the runtime on the APC battery backup when there's a power outage. The UGREEN did cost $700 but the savings on the electricity bill will recover that in about 4 years. I also like the UGREEN toolless hard drive sleds. The old Silverstone tower hd sleds required screws. I also like the smaller footprint. The NAS appliance was a total quality-of-life improvement. The only thing I "lost" from the old tower setup was the CD/DVD drive bay. But I don't rip discs anymore so I that doesn't matter. If I really really wanted to, I can hook up a DVD drive to the UGREEN via a SATA-to-USB adapter but I hope to never buy physical media again so I don't expect that will happen. There's an allure to re-using a "free" old PC as a NAS and there's also the pride of a DIY storage solution. However, that mindset also makes one overlook the negatives of that setup. Sometimes, "free" items actually cost more money.
- shuwix 3mo ago
  Situation on market is very simple to explain: People spending months in 8-5 jobs to save money to buy HW don't bother to spend few minutes to make research on what they're buying. I have Ugreen DXP4800 plus NAS with 10-core i5-1235u and 32GB RAM, 10GBit LAN for price of what people pay for Synology with 4-core low power Ryzen 1500 and 8GB RAM and 2,5GBit LAN. And if I wanted to save money, I would buy some older workstation for pennies with hell lot of GB ECC's, lots of caddy's add extenion cards for NVMe.
- layer8 3mo ago
  Hot-swappable, lockable drive bays with individual LED indicators. Needing more SATA ports than PCs typically come with. Features like auto-shutdown on USP failure that work out of the box. NICs with more than 1 Gbps. Lower power usage.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- hyperbovine 3mo ago
  Power consumption?
- zeagle 3mo ago
  I do the same with Debian. An old 3079 nvidia card for the server, docker for most service, and the onboard amd onboard discrete gpu passed through to a blueiris vm. Power is a bit higher but I’m fine with the flexibility and lack of vendor lock in and upgrade paths. If it dies any zfs machine could mount those drives.
trvz 3mo ago
Soldered RAM being bad is an opinion, not a fact. I’ve seen way too many RAM slots go bad. Smart people always get the highest configuration in computers, unless they know they’ll never need some of the resources and can tolerate a lower option.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3mo ago
  > Smart people always get the highest configuration in computers Smart rich people, maybe. Have you got the money for extra RAM right now?
  - trvz 3mo ago
    It's implied. Truly smart people manage to become affluent.
    - defrost 3mo ago
      The legendary wealth of Paul Erdős was indeed largely of legend alone.
      - farfatched 3mo ago
        We've all what a terrible job LLMs do in some problems. But they are doing well at burning down Erdos's list of problems. Perhaps mathematicians aren't a good measure of "truly smart".
        defrost 3mo ago
        If you're seriously taking that angle on comparison .. how well are they doing on generating interesting and challenging Erdős like problems?
        farfatched 3mo ago
        Oh, not that seriously, but it makes me wonder!
Almondsetat 3mo ago
I don't share the author's view of the OSs becoming copycats of eachother and not that specialized. Truth to be told, a NAS is the perfect place to have your home server. You can have both your applications and data on the same device and avoid having to build a lab just to have nextcloud or some other utility self hosted. However, to achieve this, the OS must become more similar to a normal linux distro, for better or for worse
- iamshs 3mo ago
  He didn't make the point clear, but the recent OSes are just trying to be Synology DSM copycats.
  - PunchyHamster 3mo ago
    funny that you think Synology is a leader here where only thing they lead is bad customer practices and CVEs
    - benoau 3mo ago
      DSM is very nice, but this is a web interface for Linux they built a long time ago and have coasted for the last decade.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  If it's a home server, it's not a NAS. A NAS is defined as a storage box. I also do not run Immich on the ARM controller of my hard drive.
miladyincontrol 3mo ago
> Software Homogenization and Interface Uniformity While I do prefer the DIY route, I'd struggle to call that "enshitified". Vensors consolidated around solutions because they work reliably, without reinventing the wheel. I'd much rather a NAS be a lightweight wrapper around a proven and easily maintained base than try to over extend themselves and jerry-rig some abomination. And for customers who rely on them it means they can shift brands and still feel basically just at home.
bob1029 3mo ago
I've always had a relatively bad experience with NAS hardware. Not necessarily due to anything the hardware manufacturer could have done. I have lost entire enclosures to lightning strikes on more than one occasion. Everyone thinks their IT skills are hot shit until they wake up to a closet full of burned hardware in the morning. It is quite a humbling experience if you've never been through it before. There isn't any kind of semiconductor process tech, file system design or RAID configuration that can save you from this. An off-site backup is the only thing that would count, which brings me to my next point. These days I just store my files in S3. Whether or not this actually costs me more money becomes a very irrelevant shade of grey once I factor in the value of my time and sanity. I prefer having the capability to store and retrieve large files, not spending time maintaining this capability. This is also my "off-site" backup. I am paying for my operational NAS and its backup effectively at the same time. No one doing DIY is remotely close to 99.999999999% durability, even with all the kings horses and men put together. I often see this urgency with total control pushing tech people into the very systems of oppression they seek to avoid. Putting your bits in some blob storage provider like AWS is not "losing the game" unless you frame it that way in your head. You can frame it as "getting one over on the bad guys" if you are a little bit clever with how you approach the problem. You can compel Amazon host any kind of bits with a sprinkle of AES256 on the client. I've been a customer with them for over 15 years and not once have they rug pulled me. I've never seen a NAS-style solution survive that long without intervention.
- stavros 3mo ago
  I have a NAS at home with ZFS snapshots and nightly offsite backups. What's so hard about that, or how is it less durable than your S3 solution?
  - bob1029 3mo ago
    How much do you pay for offsite backups? How durable are they?
    - stavros 3mo ago
      I think around $50/yr for around a TB? It's rsync.net, so I think very durable.
iamshs 3mo ago
Expensive drives have become such a pain. Maybe five years from now, if supply meets demand, I just wish I can afford a 1PB all-flash NAS. I really don't want to hear noise and I wish data centres would release their used supply on market. I will put backup on HDDs. Soldered RAM and novel format hardware is a pain point. Macbook storage upgrade needs special custom hardware. Synology still doesn't allow third party HDDs in their extension units. NAS devices are truly a fantastic category on its own. My data remains local, while also allowing me to use it as a server for my workloads.
- bingo-bongo 3mo ago
  > I wish data centres would release their used supply on market. They do: https://serverpartdeals.com/ https://serverpartdeals.com/ Haven’t used them myself, but afair Wendel (Level1Techs) mentioned them at some point.
  - iamshs 3mo ago
    Server Part Deals is really good since they test the drives themselves. But even the used drives are on the verge of being unaffordable now. They increased the price of their 28TB re-certified drive last month by $120.
    - jimz 3mo ago
      Well, you can take a walk on the wild side and for whatever reason this aggregator has a particularly robust set of sorting categories when it comes to hard drives. https://www.saleturbo.com/techdeals/ https://www.saleturbo.com/techdeals/ Caveat emptor, of course.
ksec 3mo ago
I don't think it is that bad. Especially Ubnt just released their UNAS Pro. ( Although only comes with BTRFS on consumer and ZFS only on the Enterprise. ) I still think Apple should have bring their AirPort Express and Time Capsule back. Instead they wanted everyone to be on their iCloud subscription.
- maigret 3mo ago
  Yes because most people don’t have an off site backup strategy.
- lostlogin 3mo ago
  > I still think Apple should have bring their AirPort Express and Time Capsule back. But for the love of God, please fix Time Machine.
nubinetwork 3mo ago
I didn't see them mention anything about adding features that aren't strictly about storing files... things like containers and virtual machines...
- benoau 3mo ago
  That's really just a side effect of processors becoming much more powerful, no point letting it go to waste just because historically a NAS had enough on its plate facilitating file access.
hkt 3mo ago
Just last month I bought a HP Micro server (N54L) from 2012, two second hand 4TB drives, 16GB of DDR3, and a 2.5GbE dual port network card. All in, that was about £180. I may shell out another £30 or so for a half depth, low profile graphics card that can support a couple of transcoding streams. Reading the article, I don't regret it. Part of what puts me off the regular NAS market is price, but also things like non redundant boot options, ambiguity about whether or not I can install my own OS, and the lack of slots. The NAS form factor itself is off-putting because if you're buying something that isn't Synology or whatever, the RAM tax is still there. Maybe I'm a cheapskate who will have slightly higher opex, but old hardware does seem to be pretty much as good as new hardware, to me.
- cryo32 3mo ago
  That's what I was running for the best part of 8 years until last year. Was very reliable. In the end I just cleaned out all my shit and got rid of it. Less is more.
  - hkt 3mo ago
    Having had nothing but a laptop for years, I think more might be more, but let's agree to disagree :)
urbandw311er 3mo ago
The cookie preference pop up on this site is unacceptable - 1 click to accept all cookies, SEVEN clicks to reject all cookies.
- boxed 3mo ago
  And if you scroll down you get a popup to ask for your email for their newsletter. The irony of an article about enshittification on a site that is clearly enshittified is strong.
- Stitch4223 3mo ago
  And after a few minutes of reading a pop-up shows for joining their mailing list. There is no mention of the usual enshittyfication, instead their complaint is that things look generic and that is the last of the list. I would say this is a feature. The points about locking and dumbing down products are well researched, true and worrisome. I’ve bought a NAS after watching NASCompares a few years ago, and also an ethernet adapter. His videos are nice. Talking about enshittyfication on an enshittyfied site misses the mark a little bit. “Legitimate interest”… lol.
- blooalien 3mo ago
  > The cookie preference pop up on this site is unacceptable - 1 click to accept all cookies, SEVEN clicks to reject all cookies. Yeah, that kinda dark pattern / malicious compliance junk ought to be straight up illegal. At least on par with "contempt of court" type situations. Sure, they may (just barely) comply with the absolute letter of the law, but the spirit of the law is surely being very much abused and deeply disrespected there.
  - Aerolfos 3mo ago
    > Yeah, that kinda dark pattern / malicious compliance junk ought to be straight up illegal. It is illegal. > To comply with the regulations governing cookies under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive you must: > [...] > - Allow users to access your service even if they refuse to allow the use of certain cookies > - Make it as easy for users to withdraw their consent as it was for them to give their consent in the first place. 7 clicks is not as easy as one "accept all", violating the last point. Not allowing you to dismiss the banner and access the site violates the other point. The real problem is enforcement, unfortunately.
userbinator 3mo ago
This architectural shift eliminates the user’s ability to expand memory capacity as self-hosting demands grow, effectively putting a permanent ceiling on running memory-heavy Docker containers, ZFS pools, or virtual machines. That's not a NAS anymore, that's a full server. I think of a NAS as "low-power computer with lots of storage attached", so not being able to upgrade the RAM on one isn't all that surprising.
- iamshs 3mo ago
  If I have CPU power at my disposal, why should I waste it? I love the fact that my NAS can serve my other needs too.
  - dijit 3mo ago
    Sure, but then shouldn’t they have a lower power CPU? I’d be worried about starving my storage need for CPU (ZFS can use a good amount of CPU power) inadvertently. Running some small services is nice, to avoid having more devices, but I think people want “server with storage” and not actually a NAS, which on the face of it is growing out from nothing more than an SMB share.
    - izacus 3mo ago
      Lower power CPUs are very powerful nowadays. Like the one in your phone - it sips power and can do what a full server could do a decade ago.
      - dijit 3mo ago
        storage has also increased (thus, its management overheads). And, to be honest with you, I’d prefer phones that are battery powered get the 3nm process node and these kind of devices lagging on 7nm or whatever, since they have the capability to be powered from the wall, and you can have less consumptive cpus taking a larger spaces making a bit more heat/power per cycle: but since you need less you can get away with it. Not everything can be 3nm or lower, the yields aren't good enough. What I care more about is ECC.
cyberrock 3mo ago
While I don't disagree with the individual complaints, I've seen this niche go from running scuffed OSes on underpowered Synologies or building DIY NASes with limited case options like the Node 304, to multiple hot swap NASes running great x86 chips (and memory slots) and many DIY build paths including 3D printed cases. Things probably suck for those reliant on Synology, but I'm stoked for this hobby, especially when Minisforum/Aoostar to start pumping out Wildcat Lake stuff.
turkishlurker 3mo ago
nitpicker here: enshitified or enshittified?
- TZubiri 3mo ago
  Maybe they're irish
TZubiri 3mo ago
Here's my single story with NAS in 10+ years of software development. A client had a NAS for their SaaS startup. Disks were having issues. The NAS was a prosumer product that was connected via USB. Had some SATA to SATA cable shipped by Amazon to the garage/colocation facility which basically meant removing the NAS and connecting the disks straight to the motherboard. Issue solved. It seems like one of those tarpit product categories that you are just better off by skipping completely, like ORMs, MCPs or reverse proxy HTTP servers.
iLoveOncall 3mo ago
I built my "NAS", which is just a normal computer with no GPU but 3 hard-drives in RAID 5, for $400 + storage cost. It is much more powerful that any NAS, even thousands of dollars ones, I'm not too sure at what cost (power consumption maybe?). I don't understand why people would go with an actual pre-built NAS from a manufacturer over my approach. It's always a complete rip-off.
AndrewDavis 3mo ago
On 1.4 "Integration of Fixed Low-Capacity OS Drives" eMMC bad because un-upgradeable and/or repairable. m.2 bad because if it wasn't there a user could put a big storage device there. I'm not even sure what the author wants here?
touwer 3mo ago
Published on a site that is enshittified with ads and nags, how ironic
asdewqqwer 3mo ago
I use a mini amd pc with a disk bay. Surprisingly it is cheaper than many nas, and much more configurable (from memory to ssd) and have a much better gpu. The only challenge would be finding a very good cable that stays solidly.
okasaki 3mo ago
The primary problem is the cost of drives now IMO. I've got 16tb drives (in a usb-c DAS, not NAS), and at 2-3 the price that I bought them for I don't plan to replace them when they go. The data will just be lost, like tears in rain.
jrm4 3mo ago
I can easily accept that arguments like "an Iphone is just a computer" are often overly reductionist. But people justifying much of this segmentation? Come ON, any NAS is just a server. What are people DOING here?
- utopiah 3mo ago
  Unfortunately an iPhone is less than a computer due to all the restrictions from Apple.
  - jrm4 3mo ago
    Yup. My point exactly. That's an unfortunately useful distinction that is fact these days. I don't think NAS v. Server or whatever this whole thread is about is -- or more importantly, should be. (In other words, the concrete position should be e.g. -- soldering RAM is just BAD actually. It's dumb and terrible and they just shouldn't do it ever.)
lostmsu 3mo ago
I am rather surprised that there's no well-supported OSS way to get full disk encryption + ZFS + automatic SSD/HDD tiering or at least caching. FDE with Secure Boot on Linux is a minefield. ZFS doesn't do tiering. Sadly on Windows tiering is also expensive (requires Server editions).
tedggh 3mo ago
Speaking of enshitification, this blog is an unreadable mess of ads and popups. As fast as I was in I was out.
- s1mon 3mo ago
  Yep. On mobile it was basically impossible to read. 2/3 of the page was covered in ads and pop ups. I figure if they don’t care about the readers’ experience then I don’t care to try to read their content.
joshspankit 3mo ago
“NAS” itself is an enshitification
duxup 3mo ago
Are there any good out of the box NAS options?
- neogodless 3mo ago
  Given the article's bullet points, I would think the UGreen options bypass the first six... the following bullet points are just general market pricing issues and other issues outside of the NAS manufacturer's control. EDIT: OK I see he doesn't like the onboard eMMC - fair enough. I paid $280 for a DXP 2800, and was fortunate enough to get drives before the recent price increases. But I've only got 8GB and missed my window for an inexpensive jump to 16GB. Still it isn't having performance issues for my needs. Serves as NAS, media server (Jellyfin), photo server (Immich). I've also dabbled with some web serving via pre-made docker images but haven't taken it very far.
  - duxup 3mo ago
    Thank you. I don’t really sweat the hardware being modular as much as I do security and privacy.
  - kotaKat 3mo ago
    I'm also team DXP2800. I was very surprised to see a super rural Walmart have DXP2800s and NAS-grade drives in stock and found out they did some weird partnership to sell UGreen hardware in some stores. (Oddly, my store still has exactly one in stock for ~$240 on clearance which is really funny seeing the very current price hike at $439 "MSRP" now. That is painful. Of course, the $279 drive I bought in store is now $399, so that also sucks.) I killed the onboard eMMC (it's just a BIOS setting - turn the eMMC off at the same time you disable the OS watchdog), slapped an NVMe inside the slot, and put my 10TB rust spinner in the bay and threw TrueNAS on the flash and it's happy as all can be. ANNOYINGLY they now seem to stock an ARM-based UGreen for around $200 as the new 'Walmart' unit and that's kinda a bit more limited in what you can do.
- gehsty 3mo ago
  I use UniFi Nas Pro - it is just a NAS, not a home server. I have it directly connected to my home server with a 10GB SFP+ link and it works super well.
joshstrange 3mo ago
I think the biggest issue is hard drive (or SSD) costs currently. I got a UNAS 8 Pro a few months ago and it still sits empty. It's my own fault, I should have priced out the drives but I was buying Unifi equipment for a new house and wanted to try our their NAS offering. I just looked and the hard drives I've bought before are currently >3x the price I last paid. I know I'm not telling anyone anything new but I'm just praying my existing drives hold out since replacing them (even 1) if they fail will cost a small fortune.
api 3mo ago
You can build your own a lot more cheaply now especially if you only want storage. There’s some canned distros and control panels for it. If the storage doesn’t need to be fast a newer Pi can do it with USB-C drives. An old Intel Mac mini from eBay makes a good home file server too and is compatible with everything. Get a thunderbolt drive bay.
VCFundedGenYer 3mo ago
FYI the article is unreachable. Clicking the link results in an erroneous "you are on a black list! Email admin@nascompares.com if you think this is a mistake." message.
hackshack 3mo ago
Many of us are sysadmins at home. Home Assistant, home NAS, home DVRs, etc. Consumer NASes are in tension against the DIY hacker / homelab people who often run these things. These NASes are just complicated enough to be consumer unfriendly, but not enough for "our" needs. The author has a good point about how NAS hardware is more integrated - less capable for power users - while the software has stagnated into a sort of semi embedded, minimal viable product. Just yesterday I heard about a friend-of-a-friend type situation where the sysadmin husband was in hospice, and the wife was struggling to figure out how to operate the NAS to recover family photos, etc. I think consumer NAS manufacturers could add a "foolproof backup connection method," such as a USB port in USB device mode, so the NAS could be easily connected to a laptop by someone with little computer knowledge, in read-only mode. That said, my home NAS is "the littlest server": an aging ProLiant DL380 Gen8 MicroServer. It's behind a double conversion UPS. SAS card + drives, Proxmox running virtualized FreeNAS, etc. Typical overdone geek build. I have not seen a finer NAS platform for the precocious home admin. I wish there were newer versions which kept the enterprise style "lights out management," and added m.2 and such, but I think HP Enterprise as a company is not interested in the homelab use case.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3mo ago
  Consumer NASes should take advantage of physical presence. There should be better functionality for a user that is standing next to the thing.
  - ethbr1 3mo ago
    This is one place I think the 00s did a disservice to security. It should have been apparent to anyone by that time that "someone malicious physically standing next to the box" is an order of magnitude rarer security risk than "someone connecting from a network" and aligned UX to that.
1970-01-01 3mo ago
The term got enshittified. Compare the definition over time via Wikipedia. Technically, NAS by the original definition can not host anything but a filesystem. It is simply free disk space, a SAN with a GUI. Anything you do to that disk space does not change what it is, until you start adding OS features, monitoring features, Wi-Fi, etc. Now it no longer is NAS - it is a server. We did this to ourselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage#Description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage#Descr... https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Network-attached_storage&oldid=160311487#Description https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Network-attached_...
kstrauser 3mo ago
Synology is truly dead to me now. I used their stuck mostly happily since my first DS412+ way back when. But this thing with locking down features to require their own branded drives is madness. No way, no how. Last year they tried restricting the OS from creating new volumes unless all drives in it were Synology branded. People tore them a new asshole in the press and they backed away from that. Now their newest DSM 7.4 release features a new smart storage system with postprocessing deduplication and compression. I tried to enable that on my own volume for testing, but nope: it only works on “pure Synology” volumes. Fuck that. Synology, get this out of your damn heads. I will never, never buy your stupid, overpriced drives. It won’t happen. Never. And on top of the ludicrous price premium, if one breaks, how do I can get a replacement urgently? If my IronWolf blows up, I can drive over to Central Computer and come home with another just like it. Amazon has few Synology drives in stock and none of them are large. When I have a dead drive, the last thing I’m gonna want to do is go on an urgent quest for a replacement unicorn. I’m done with ‘em. It’s clear they’re fixated on this stupid idea and aren’t going to give it up. Well, good luck with that and your remaining customer base, which no longer includes me.
- _rwo 3mo ago
  majority of Synology storage-compatibility-related _problems_ can be solved with this: https://github.com/007revad/Synology_HDD_db https://github.com/007revad/Synology_HDD_db - seems to 'just work' unsure about this 'smart storage' as my Syno is too old anyway :)
  - kstrauser 3mo ago
    I think it's amazing that this project exists, and I have much respect for the authors. Well done. Still, I don't want to get stuck lying to my OS to make its features work on my hardware, and I don't want to have to trust that no future OS updates will remove that workaround. It feels like depending on a jailbroken phone. It's your phone: of course you have the right to do whatever you want with the hardware. I wouldn't want to count on the jailbreak continuing to work, though.
vkaku 3mo ago
It's easy to build one yourself. Just don't buy from vendors if you can't run your own software. It's that simple. I've run two NAS appliances for 15+ years now, and never had to worry about any of this, because I just run good old Community Linux or BSD on it. I can plug whatever PCIe card I want, as much storage as I want and from whom I want.
itchingsphynx 3mo ago
I agree on most points, except perhaps for the expectation of compute and RAM since NAS = ‘network attached storage.’ I’ve had a HP N40L for 15 years and every time I see the current offerings I hope I don’t have to look for hardware soon; it’s been such a great homelab server. After FreeNAS > TrueNAS Core, I now roll my own FreeBSD. It felt like a great leap into the deep end going from GUI to CLI, but I haven’t once looked back.
quailfarmer 3mo ago
On the first point specifically, everyone is going to need to wrap their heads around memory being more tightly integrated with compute in future generations. The modular form factor restricts DRAM speed, bus width, hurts reliability and cost. Memory modules provide flexibility, but the cost is real. I suspect in the future we will get better at re-balling memory ICs.
xela79 3mo ago
> Software Homogenization and Interface Uniformity how is this a negative? I would say, please do more like ugreen and support alternative OS, provide drivers and integrations.

thadt 3mo ago

Given the (non-) responsiveness of the page, I’m going with they focused too much on “storage” and not enough on “network attached.”

swipee 3mo ago
Haha touché! Hope it starts working soon so I can verify this statement.
solarkraft 3mo ago
The website is also so hilariously enshittified that the “enshittification” text barely peeked through the ads and other popups.

zeafoamrun 3mo ago

I built my own NAS, just Ubuntu+ZFS using an old PC I had and it works great. Don't know why people are so crazy about buying prebuilt NASes.

fuzzy2 3mo ago
Why wouldn't they be? No fiddling, super compact form factor, (usually) far superior energy efficiency, maybe phone apps, did I mention no fiddling? Also, the form factor!
- alanfranz 3mo ago
  But form factor and energy efficiency may be helped by some of the changes that producers are doing. Why complain about those, then? Diy is still possible. Looks like nas is becoming more specialized.
  - tentacleuno 3mo ago
    I suspect the energy efficiency correlates with how old it is -- modern silicon in laptops is amazing. I doubt a new PC would take up 45W like this i7 7700k-powered one I've had for years.
- whyagaindavid 3mo ago
  No fiddling is definitely not a primary point. If one has both valuable or large amounts of data fiddling is inevitable. Nothing I have seen in retail markets is at a level of chromecast or phone setup or TV setup. And often not only the price is high but poor reliability. It is amazing that no one spoke about security in any of the child comments of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131785
  - lm2s 3mo ago
    Of course no fiddling is a primary point. That’s probably _the main point_. Sure you need _some_ configuration/setup, but it’s in a completely different ballpark to a custom built solution.
    - whyagaindavid 3mo ago
      which brand? Anytime you have data locally it is lot of work. There is a reason people go to Google drive or even proton drive etc for that reason. If you can do that initial setup then DIY is not worse. Yes, all these plug-n-play give a false sense of security. One of the RAID drives is failing - no one knows. Your definition of fiddling is maybe wrong. Not everyone is Linus S or Jeff geerling to look for that exact DDR stick etc. Get a resonable laptop or mini PC with 2 x drives. Done. Even windows drive share.
      - anonreplier 3mo ago
        Why are you comparing a laptop to a NAS?
      - conorcleary 3mo ago
        storage of data long-term of course to many segments of a market needs to be seamless and safe feeling, comforting even. To slap a brand on the side of a NAS that is complex and causes grandma to lose the entire family photo history that you scanned for a few summers after your uncle did research for decades - well, that's not great for repeat sales, right?
  - 3mo ago
- poisonborz 3mo ago
  This "no fiddling" could be the single entire counterpoint to the article and hacker culture in general. All the problems stem from "consumer wants no fiddling".
  - fuzzy2 3mo ago
    I think it's a little more nuanced. Most people cannot fiddle (with PCs). They would have to learn to, first. Does this mean they deserve to have shit shoved down their throats? No. However, they are very vulnerable, and companies want to capitalize on this fact. Hackers (whatever kind) are just one portion of the total populace. Others deserve genuinely good products, too. And maybe sometimes even a hacker wants to take a break. ;-)
    - kergonath 3mo ago
      > Most people cannot fiddle (with PCs). They would have to learn to, first. Does this mean they deserve to have shit shoved down their throats? I can fiddle perfectly well. I do it all day at work, with workstations, servers and HPC. I can already scratch that itch with much nicer than I will be ever able to buy myself. But I am not spending 1 hour more than I need to for my NAS at home, life is too short and I also like to have other hobbies. To the point that yes, I do spend a bit more for convenience and niceness. > And maybe sometimes even a hacker wants to take a break. ;-) Exactly.
- throwawayffffas 3mo ago
  I setup one on an old pc 4 years ago freebsd zfs, literally an hour of maintenance over the course of 4 years now with ai anyone can do it.
- tym0 3mo ago
  Yeah the compact form factor and energy efficiency were the strongest point for me.
- CamperBob2 3mo ago
  For me, "fiddling" is now the job of Claude Code. Nobody who can manage to install Claude needs to be intimidated by anything else in Linux.
sandworm101 3mo ago
For me, it was laziness. While I have the skills to built one from parts, I just wanted a big drive in an aesthetically pleasing box. I didn't want a project. I wanted something small and somewhat rugged. So I got a synology 5-bay almost seven years ago and have never looked back. It lives beside my UPS and wifi router in a small tower, all objects I expect to "just work" for months on end without any attention. My AI rig ... that is a project. (After a kernel update, one of my GPUs has disappeared. Fixing that will be a project for my next day off.) I don't want my NAS to ever become a weekend project.
mcfedr 3mo ago
i did that, and really wish i bought something , mostly because i have like 4 hhds just lying in the bottom of the case
- zeafoamrun 3mo ago
  My old case was a big workstation one with 10 drive bays already. Definitely preferable to having them loose
  - permalac 3mo ago
    I bought a plastic tower for disks which let's me have 10 disks with some space between them. I then bought some Artic fans and attached them with tape to the 'tower'. Then I used a 11 years old optiplex 990 as Debian zfs connected to 8 of the disks, and I have 2 spares which I'll be able to use when the others die. Performance is great. I could do it because I was given those disks for free, with plenty of ours on each of them.
- mindslight 3mo ago
  Several hardware generations back, my old 4x160GB raid5 had two drives on the bottom of the case, held on by screws going through holes I drilled in the outer wall of the case. These days I managed to snag a deal on a Supermicro 846. I'm still settling into it, the main thing that concerns me is being able to suck enough air through the drive bays without making a lot of noise. My previous incarnation used some iStar toolless drive bays. I've learned to appreciate hot-swap bays, mainly for only having to do the cabling once.
yjftsjthsd-h 3mo ago
Maybe power efficiency?
- dd8601fn 3mo ago
  And simplicity. And cost vs suitability for purpose. And form factor. And vendor support for the unit. Jank ass recycled pcs and expensive, overbuilt diy rigs simply don’t even belong in the same conversation.
Galanwe 3mo ago
Its the maintenance and details that kill your NAS. You will probably rely on it for 10 years at least, so building your NAS means committing to maintaining it in the long term, you have to be sure this is something you will uphold. Also while setting up your NAS initially is definitely doable, there are a trillion little things to get right and make sure won't bite you later on (scrubble, etc). All these things compounds if the NAS is not just for you, but your wife, kids, family, etc. Now it becomes your responsibility that all these precious data and photos entrusted to you are 100% safe for the decades to come.
- zeafoamrun 3mo ago
  As some kind of cosmic karma for making my smug comment, one of my metadata mirror vdevs died this morning while my wife was doing a big transfer.
- iLoveOncall 3mo ago
  > All these things compounds if the NAS is not just for you, but your wife, kids, family, etc. Now it becomes your responsibility that all these precious data and photos entrusted to you are 100% safe for the decades to come. A NAS is not a backup? It's hot storage. I have a NAS but I backup my photos on AWS in S3 Deep Glacier. It costs me less than $1 a month for 500GB of pictures. That's a backup.
  - PunchyHamster 3mo ago
    If it is secondary place to store and has some archiving/delete protection it is a backup. If it is only place you store your data sure, you need another option to backup the NAS itself
- vladvasiliu 3mo ago
  But are these off-the-shelf solutions actually supported for ten years? And since they're usually bought for "easy remote connectivity" and whatnot, that's rather important. Bonus points for updates typically being installed automatically, so people won't even think to check whether it's still updated or not. I have a NAS made from a 15-year-old computer, with standard parts. It can saturate a gigabit link over WireGuard, so it's good enough for my needs. I installed the latest Linux kernel on it the other day. And it doesn't have random unknown stuff calling home. Since it runs ZFS and scrubs regularly, I'm quite confident the data on it is still in good shape.
crabbone 3mo ago
I believe that the target market for this equipment is small / medium size enterprises that need a solution for local storage of whatever information they process in their day-to-day operations. So, they won't have a system administrator on staff. They would rather try to assemble their computer system themselves or pay someone once to put things together. In this context, having a pre-built component that one can plug into the larger system is what customers would be looking for. It's similar to the days when buying a PC would involve either finding a friend who could read the specs from the computer shop, make a list and assemble the PC once all the components are bought, or you'd buy a build from the shop (with some extra markup for the service). And today most PC users have moved on to laptops if not just even phones. Most people will use what's commercially available. Today, most NAS users won't have an old PC case with HDD mounts laying around. They will have to buy something, and that something will likely be a pre-built NAS, the kind this article is written about. And similar to how laptops are a form of enshitification of desktops, these NAS boxes are too. Removing modularity drives the price down, but also doesn't allow the users the ability to repair and to study the product they own. People aren't "crazy" about buying pre-built NAS boxes. It's what there is, they buy what's available.
hyperbolablabla 3mo ago
[dead]
jasode 3mo ago
>using an old PC I had and it works great. Don't know why people are so crazy about buying prebuilt NASes. The problem is the "old pc" is typically a desktop-class cpu which is very power hungry. (~100 watts). And to make things worse, the older cpu has slower performance that doesn't justify the extra watts it consumes. For 17+ years, I used a 2008 era Intel DX58SO motherboard + Core i7 920 in a full size Silverstone tower case as my NAS. It originally started with 1.5 TB drives and I just kept upgrading the drives all the way up to 16 TB. It worked ok and was reliable so I was never interested in turnkey NAS appliance like Synology, etc. I also wanted to install my own os, plus recycle/reuse/repurpose philosophy, and not be shackled by a proprietary NAS ... yada yada yada. The big problem with re-using my old PC is that at idle, it consumed 125 watts. Electricity isn't 11 cents per kWh like it was 17 years ago. It's now 21c/kWh -- and will keep going up because of AI, oil prices, etc. Last month, I did a lot of research to reduce the power usage and ended up buying a UGREEN DXP4800 Pro NAS appliance. UGREEN lets you install your own os and it uses a laptop-class cpu (much better performance specs than Synology) which is much more power efficient. At idle, it consumes just 25 watts. Also, the Intel i3-1315U in the UGREEN has a Geekbench score of 2124 which beats the i7 920 of 450. So 4x the performance while using 1/5th the power usage! I briefly considered "upgrading" my DX58SO/i7-920 to another old pc (2014 era) X99/i7-5820K. That's slightly more power efficient of ~80 watts idle. However, running ffmpeg to convert videos makes it jump to ~180w! The UGREEN can do the same ffmpeg conversion with better performance and yet it only increases to ~45 watts. Another unexpected bonus of lower power usage is that my server room temperature is noticeably less warm, and the lower power UGREEN gets 3x the runtime on the APC battery backup when there's a power outage. The UGREEN did cost $700 but the savings on the electricity bill will recover that in about 4 years. I also like the UGREEN toolless hard drive sleds. The old Silverstone tower hd sleds required screws. I also like the smaller footprint. The NAS appliance was a total quality-of-life improvement. The only thing I "lost" from the old tower setup was the CD/DVD drive bay. But I don't rip discs anymore so I that doesn't matter. If I really really wanted to, I can hook up a DVD drive to the UGREEN via a SATA-to-USB adapter but I hope to never buy physical media again so I don't expect that will happen. There's an allure to re-using a "free" old PC as a NAS and there's also the pride of a DIY storage solution. However, that mindset also makes one overlook the negatives of that setup. Sometimes, "free" items actually cost more money.
shuwix 3mo ago
Situation on market is very simple to explain: People spending months in 8-5 jobs to save money to buy HW don't bother to spend few minutes to make research on what they're buying. I have Ugreen DXP4800 plus NAS with 10-core i5-1235u and 32GB RAM, 10GBit LAN for price of what people pay for Synology with 4-core low power Ryzen 1500 and 8GB RAM and 2,5GBit LAN. And if I wanted to save money, I would buy some older workstation for pennies with hell lot of GB ECC's, lots of caddy's add extenion cards for NVMe.
layer8 3mo ago
Hot-swappable, lockable drive bays with individual LED indicators. Needing more SATA ports than PCs typically come with. Features like auto-shutdown on USP failure that work out of the box. NICs with more than 1 Gbps. Lower power usage.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
hyperbovine 3mo ago
Power consumption?
zeagle 3mo ago
I do the same with Debian. An old 3079 nvidia card for the server, docker for most service, and the onboard amd onboard discrete gpu passed through to a blueiris vm. Power is a bit higher but I’m fine with the flexibility and lack of vendor lock in and upgrade paths. If it dies any zfs machine could mount those drives.

trvz 3mo ago

Soldered RAM being bad is an opinion, not a fact. I’ve seen way too many RAM slots go bad. Smart people always get the highest configuration in computers, unless they know they’ll never need some of the resources and can tolerate a lower option.

yjftsjthsd-h 3mo ago
> Smart people always get the highest configuration in computers Smart rich people, maybe. Have you got the money for extra RAM right now?
- trvz 3mo ago
  It's implied. Truly smart people manage to become affluent.
  - defrost 3mo ago
    The legendary wealth of Paul Erdős was indeed largely of legend alone.
    - farfatched 3mo ago
      We've all what a terrible job LLMs do in some problems. But they are doing well at burning down Erdos's list of problems. Perhaps mathematicians aren't a good measure of "truly smart".
      - defrost 3mo ago
        If you're seriously taking that angle on comparison .. how well are they doing on generating interesting and challenging Erdős like problems?
        farfatched 3mo ago
        Oh, not that seriously, but it makes me wonder!

Almondsetat 3mo ago

I don't share the author's view of the OSs becoming copycats of eachother and not that specialized. Truth to be told, a NAS is the perfect place to have your home server. You can have both your applications and data on the same device and avoid having to build a lab just to have nextcloud or some other utility self hosted. However, to achieve this, the OS must become more similar to a normal linux distro, for better or for worse

iamshs 3mo ago
He didn't make the point clear, but the recent OSes are just trying to be Synology DSM copycats.
- PunchyHamster 3mo ago
  funny that you think Synology is a leader here where only thing they lead is bad customer practices and CVEs
  - benoau 3mo ago
    DSM is very nice, but this is a web interface for Linux they built a long time ago and have coasted for the last decade.
inigyou 3mo ago
If it's a home server, it's not a NAS. A NAS is defined as a storage box. I also do not run Immich on the ARM controller of my hard drive.

miladyincontrol 3mo ago

> Software Homogenization and Interface Uniformity While I do prefer the DIY route, I'd struggle to call that "enshitified". Vensors consolidated around solutions because they work reliably, without reinventing the wheel. I'd much rather a NAS be a lightweight wrapper around a proven and easily maintained base than try to over extend themselves and jerry-rig some abomination. And for customers who rely on them it means they can shift brands and still feel basically just at home.

bob1029 3mo ago

I've always had a relatively bad experience with NAS hardware. Not necessarily due to anything the hardware manufacturer could have done. I have lost entire enclosures to lightning strikes on more than one occasion. Everyone thinks their IT skills are hot shit until they wake up to a closet full of burned hardware in the morning. It is quite a humbling experience if you've never been through it before. There isn't any kind of semiconductor process tech, file system design or RAID configuration that can save you from this. An off-site backup is the only thing that would count, which brings me to my next point. These days I just store my files in S3. Whether or not this actually costs me more money becomes a very irrelevant shade of grey once I factor in the value of my time and sanity. I prefer having the capability to store and retrieve large files, not spending time maintaining this capability. This is also my "off-site" backup. I am paying for my operational NAS and its backup effectively at the same time. No one doing DIY is remotely close to 99.999999999% durability, even with all the kings horses and men put together. I often see this urgency with total control pushing tech people into the very systems of oppression they seek to avoid. Putting your bits in some blob storage provider like AWS is not "losing the game" unless you frame it that way in your head. You can frame it as "getting one over on the bad guys" if you are a little bit clever with how you approach the problem. You can compel Amazon host any kind of bits with a sprinkle of AES256 on the client. I've been a customer with them for over 15 years and not once have they rug pulled me. I've never seen a NAS-style solution survive that long without intervention.

stavros 3mo ago
I have a NAS at home with ZFS snapshots and nightly offsite backups. What's so hard about that, or how is it less durable than your S3 solution?
- bob1029 3mo ago
  How much do you pay for offsite backups? How durable are they?
  - stavros 3mo ago
    I think around $50/yr for around a TB? It's rsync.net, so I think very durable.

iamshs 3mo ago

Expensive drives have become such a pain. Maybe five years from now, if supply meets demand, I just wish I can afford a 1PB all-flash NAS. I really don't want to hear noise and I wish data centres would release their used supply on market. I will put backup on HDDs. Soldered RAM and novel format hardware is a pain point. Macbook storage upgrade needs special custom hardware. Synology still doesn't allow third party HDDs in their extension units. NAS devices are truly a fantastic category on its own. My data remains local, while also allowing me to use it as a server for my workloads.

bingo-bongo 3mo ago
> I wish data centres would release their used supply on market. They do: https://serverpartdeals.com/ https://serverpartdeals.com/ Haven’t used them myself, but afair Wendel (Level1Techs) mentioned them at some point.
- iamshs 3mo ago
  Server Part Deals is really good since they test the drives themselves. But even the used drives are on the verge of being unaffordable now. They increased the price of their 28TB re-certified drive last month by $120.
  - jimz 3mo ago
    Well, you can take a walk on the wild side and for whatever reason this aggregator has a particularly robust set of sorting categories when it comes to hard drives. https://www.saleturbo.com/techdeals/ https://www.saleturbo.com/techdeals/ Caveat emptor, of course.

ksec 3mo ago

I don't think it is that bad. Especially Ubnt just released their UNAS Pro. ( Although only comes with BTRFS on consumer and ZFS only on the Enterprise. ) I still think Apple should have bring their AirPort Express and Time Capsule back. Instead they wanted everyone to be on their iCloud subscription.

maigret 3mo ago
Yes because most people don’t have an off site backup strategy.
lostlogin 3mo ago
> I still think Apple should have bring their AirPort Express and Time Capsule back. But for the love of God, please fix Time Machine.

nubinetwork 3mo ago

I didn't see them mention anything about adding features that aren't strictly about storing files... things like containers and virtual machines...

benoau 3mo ago
That's really just a side effect of processors becoming much more powerful, no point letting it go to waste just because historically a NAS had enough on its plate facilitating file access.

hkt 3mo ago

Just last month I bought a HP Micro server (N54L) from 2012, two second hand 4TB drives, 16GB of DDR3, and a 2.5GbE dual port network card. All in, that was about £180. I may shell out another £30 or so for a half depth, low profile graphics card that can support a couple of transcoding streams. Reading the article, I don't regret it. Part of what puts me off the regular NAS market is price, but also things like non redundant boot options, ambiguity about whether or not I can install my own OS, and the lack of slots. The NAS form factor itself is off-putting because if you're buying something that isn't Synology or whatever, the RAM tax is still there. Maybe I'm a cheapskate who will have slightly higher opex, but old hardware does seem to be pretty much as good as new hardware, to me.

cryo32 3mo ago
That's what I was running for the best part of 8 years until last year. Was very reliable. In the end I just cleaned out all my shit and got rid of it. Less is more.
- hkt 3mo ago
  Having had nothing but a laptop for years, I think more might be more, but let's agree to disagree :)

urbandw311er 3mo ago

The cookie preference pop up on this site is unacceptable - 1 click to accept all cookies, SEVEN clicks to reject all cookies.

boxed 3mo ago
And if you scroll down you get a popup to ask for your email for their newsletter. The irony of an article about enshittification on a site that is clearly enshittified is strong.
Stitch4223 3mo ago
And after a few minutes of reading a pop-up shows for joining their mailing list. There is no mention of the usual enshittyfication, instead their complaint is that things look generic and that is the last of the list. I would say this is a feature. The points about locking and dumbing down products are well researched, true and worrisome. I’ve bought a NAS after watching NASCompares a few years ago, and also an ethernet adapter. His videos are nice. Talking about enshittyfication on an enshittyfied site misses the mark a little bit. “Legitimate interest”… lol.
blooalien 3mo ago
> The cookie preference pop up on this site is unacceptable - 1 click to accept all cookies, SEVEN clicks to reject all cookies. Yeah, that kinda dark pattern / malicious compliance junk ought to be straight up illegal. At least on par with "contempt of court" type situations. Sure, they may (just barely) comply with the absolute letter of the law, but the spirit of the law is surely being very much abused and deeply disrespected there.
- Aerolfos 3mo ago
  > Yeah, that kinda dark pattern / malicious compliance junk ought to be straight up illegal. It is illegal. > To comply with the regulations governing cookies under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive you must: > [...] > - Allow users to access your service even if they refuse to allow the use of certain cookies > - Make it as easy for users to withdraw their consent as it was for them to give their consent in the first place. 7 clicks is not as easy as one "accept all", violating the last point. Not allowing you to dismiss the banner and access the site violates the other point. The real problem is enforcement, unfortunately.

userbinator 3mo ago

This architectural shift eliminates the user’s ability to expand memory capacity as self-hosting demands grow, effectively putting a permanent ceiling on running memory-heavy Docker containers, ZFS pools, or virtual machines. That's not a NAS anymore, that's a full server. I think of a NAS as "low-power computer with lots of storage attached", so not being able to upgrade the RAM on one isn't all that surprising.

iamshs 3mo ago
If I have CPU power at my disposal, why should I waste it? I love the fact that my NAS can serve my other needs too.
- dijit 3mo ago
  Sure, but then shouldn’t they have a lower power CPU? I’d be worried about starving my storage need for CPU (ZFS can use a good amount of CPU power) inadvertently. Running some small services is nice, to avoid having more devices, but I think people want “server with storage” and not actually a NAS, which on the face of it is growing out from nothing more than an SMB share.
  - izacus 3mo ago
    Lower power CPUs are very powerful nowadays. Like the one in your phone - it sips power and can do what a full server could do a decade ago.
    - dijit 3mo ago
      storage has also increased (thus, its management overheads). And, to be honest with you, I’d prefer phones that are battery powered get the 3nm process node and these kind of devices lagging on 7nm or whatever, since they have the capability to be powered from the wall, and you can have less consumptive cpus taking a larger spaces making a bit more heat/power per cycle: but since you need less you can get away with it. Not everything can be 3nm or lower, the yields aren't good enough. What I care more about is ECC.

cyberrock 3mo ago

While I don't disagree with the individual complaints, I've seen this niche go from running scuffed OSes on underpowered Synologies or building DIY NASes with limited case options like the Node 304, to multiple hot swap NASes running great x86 chips (and memory slots) and many DIY build paths including 3D printed cases. Things probably suck for those reliant on Synology, but I'm stoked for this hobby, especially when Minisforum/Aoostar to start pumping out Wildcat Lake stuff.

turkishlurker 3mo ago

nitpicker here: enshitified or enshittified?

TZubiri 3mo ago
Maybe they're irish

TZubiri 3mo ago

Here's my single story with NAS in 10+ years of software development. A client had a NAS for their SaaS startup. Disks were having issues. The NAS was a prosumer product that was connected via USB. Had some SATA to SATA cable shipped by Amazon to the garage/colocation facility which basically meant removing the NAS and connecting the disks straight to the motherboard. Issue solved. It seems like one of those tarpit product categories that you are just better off by skipping completely, like ORMs, MCPs or reverse proxy HTTP servers.

iLoveOncall 3mo ago

I built my "NAS", which is just a normal computer with no GPU but 3 hard-drives in RAID 5, for $400 + storage cost. It is much more powerful that any NAS, even thousands of dollars ones, I'm not too sure at what cost (power consumption maybe?). I don't understand why people would go with an actual pre-built NAS from a manufacturer over my approach. It's always a complete rip-off.

AndrewDavis 3mo ago

On 1.4 "Integration of Fixed Low-Capacity OS Drives" eMMC bad because un-upgradeable and/or repairable. m.2 bad because if it wasn't there a user could put a big storage device there. I'm not even sure what the author wants here?

touwer 3mo ago

Published on a site that is enshittified with ads and nags, how ironic

asdewqqwer 3mo ago

I use a mini amd pc with a disk bay. Surprisingly it is cheaper than many nas, and much more configurable (from memory to ssd) and have a much better gpu. The only challenge would be finding a very good cable that stays solidly.

okasaki 3mo ago

The primary problem is the cost of drives now IMO. I've got 16tb drives (in a usb-c DAS, not NAS), and at 2-3 the price that I bought them for I don't plan to replace them when they go. The data will just be lost, like tears in rain.

jrm4 3mo ago

I can easily accept that arguments like "an Iphone is just a computer" are often overly reductionist. But people justifying much of this segmentation? Come ON, any NAS is just a server. What are people DOING here?

utopiah 3mo ago
Unfortunately an iPhone is less than a computer due to all the restrictions from Apple.
- jrm4 3mo ago
  Yup. My point exactly. That's an unfortunately useful distinction that is fact these days. I don't think NAS v. Server or whatever this whole thread is about is -- or more importantly, should be. (In other words, the concrete position should be e.g. -- soldering RAM is just BAD actually. It's dumb and terrible and they just shouldn't do it ever.)

lostmsu 3mo ago

I am rather surprised that there's no well-supported OSS way to get full disk encryption + ZFS + automatic SSD/HDD tiering or at least caching. FDE with Secure Boot on Linux is a minefield. ZFS doesn't do tiering. Sadly on Windows tiering is also expensive (requires Server editions).

tedggh 3mo ago

Speaking of enshitification, this blog is an unreadable mess of ads and popups. As fast as I was in I was out.

s1mon 3mo ago
Yep. On mobile it was basically impossible to read. 2/3 of the page was covered in ads and pop ups. I figure if they don’t care about the readers’ experience then I don’t care to try to read their content.

joshspankit 3mo ago

“NAS” itself is an enshitification

duxup 3mo ago

Are there any good out of the box NAS options?

neogodless 3mo ago
Given the article's bullet points, I would think the UGreen options bypass the first six... the following bullet points are just general market pricing issues and other issues outside of the NAS manufacturer's control. EDIT: OK I see he doesn't like the onboard eMMC - fair enough. I paid $280 for a DXP 2800, and was fortunate enough to get drives before the recent price increases. But I've only got 8GB and missed my window for an inexpensive jump to 16GB. Still it isn't having performance issues for my needs. Serves as NAS, media server (Jellyfin), photo server (Immich). I've also dabbled with some web serving via pre-made docker images but haven't taken it very far.
- duxup 3mo ago
  Thank you. I don’t really sweat the hardware being modular as much as I do security and privacy.
- kotaKat 3mo ago
  I'm also team DXP2800. I was very surprised to see a super rural Walmart have DXP2800s and NAS-grade drives in stock and found out they did some weird partnership to sell UGreen hardware in some stores. (Oddly, my store still has exactly one in stock for ~$240 on clearance which is really funny seeing the very current price hike at $439 "MSRP" now. That is painful. Of course, the $279 drive I bought in store is now $399, so that also sucks.) I killed the onboard eMMC (it's just a BIOS setting - turn the eMMC off at the same time you disable the OS watchdog), slapped an NVMe inside the slot, and put my 10TB rust spinner in the bay and threw TrueNAS on the flash and it's happy as all can be. ANNOYINGLY they now seem to stock an ARM-based UGreen for around $200 as the new 'Walmart' unit and that's kinda a bit more limited in what you can do.
gehsty 3mo ago
I use UniFi Nas Pro - it is just a NAS, not a home server. I have it directly connected to my home server with a 10GB SFP+ link and it works super well.

joshstrange 3mo ago

I think the biggest issue is hard drive (or SSD) costs currently. I got a UNAS 8 Pro a few months ago and it still sits empty. It's my own fault, I should have priced out the drives but I was buying Unifi equipment for a new house and wanted to try our their NAS offering. I just looked and the hard drives I've bought before are currently >3x the price I last paid. I know I'm not telling anyone anything new but I'm just praying my existing drives hold out since replacing them (even 1) if they fail will cost a small fortune.

api 3mo ago

You can build your own a lot more cheaply now especially if you only want storage. There’s some canned distros and control panels for it. If the storage doesn’t need to be fast a newer Pi can do it with USB-C drives. An old Intel Mac mini from eBay makes a good home file server too and is compatible with everything. Get a thunderbolt drive bay.

VCFundedGenYer 3mo ago

FYI the article is unreachable. Clicking the link results in an erroneous "you are on a black list! Email admin@nascompares.com if you think this is a mistake." message.

hackshack 3mo ago

Many of us are sysadmins at home. Home Assistant, home NAS, home DVRs, etc. Consumer NASes are in tension against the DIY hacker / homelab people who often run these things. These NASes are just complicated enough to be consumer unfriendly, but not enough for "our" needs. The author has a good point about how NAS hardware is more integrated - less capable for power users - while the software has stagnated into a sort of semi embedded, minimal viable product. Just yesterday I heard about a friend-of-a-friend type situation where the sysadmin husband was in hospice, and the wife was struggling to figure out how to operate the NAS to recover family photos, etc. I think consumer NAS manufacturers could add a "foolproof backup connection method," such as a USB port in USB device mode, so the NAS could be easily connected to a laptop by someone with little computer knowledge, in read-only mode. That said, my home NAS is "the littlest server": an aging ProLiant DL380 Gen8 MicroServer. It's behind a double conversion UPS. SAS card + drives, Proxmox running virtualized FreeNAS, etc. Typical overdone geek build. I have not seen a finer NAS platform for the precocious home admin. I wish there were newer versions which kept the enterprise style "lights out management," and added m.2 and such, but I think HP Enterprise as a company is not interested in the homelab use case.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3mo ago
Consumer NASes should take advantage of physical presence. There should be better functionality for a user that is standing next to the thing.
- ethbr1 3mo ago
  This is one place I think the 00s did a disservice to security. It should have been apparent to anyone by that time that "someone malicious physically standing next to the box" is an order of magnitude rarer security risk than "someone connecting from a network" and aligned UX to that.

1970-01-01 3mo ago

The term got enshittified. Compare the definition over time via Wikipedia. Technically, NAS by the original definition can not host anything but a filesystem. It is simply free disk space, a SAN with a GUI. Anything you do to that disk space does not change what it is, until you start adding OS features, monitoring features, Wi-Fi, etc. Now it no longer is NAS - it is a server. We did this to ourselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage#Description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage#Descr... https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Network-attached_storage&oldid=160311487#Description https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Network-attached_...

kstrauser 3mo ago

Synology is truly dead to me now. I used their stuck mostly happily since my first DS412+ way back when. But this thing with locking down features to require their own branded drives is madness. No way, no how. Last year they tried restricting the OS from creating new volumes unless all drives in it were Synology branded. People tore them a new asshole in the press and they backed away from that. Now their newest DSM 7.4 release features a new smart storage system with postprocessing deduplication and compression. I tried to enable that on my own volume for testing, but nope: it only works on “pure Synology” volumes. Fuck that. Synology, get this out of your damn heads. I will never, never buy your stupid, overpriced drives. It won’t happen. Never. And on top of the ludicrous price premium, if one breaks, how do I can get a replacement urgently? If my IronWolf blows up, I can drive over to Central Computer and come home with another just like it. Amazon has few Synology drives in stock and none of them are large. When I have a dead drive, the last thing I’m gonna want to do is go on an urgent quest for a replacement unicorn. I’m done with ‘em. It’s clear they’re fixated on this stupid idea and aren’t going to give it up. Well, good luck with that and your remaining customer base, which no longer includes me.

_rwo 3mo ago
majority of Synology storage-compatibility-related _problems_ can be solved with this: https://github.com/007revad/Synology_HDD_db https://github.com/007revad/Synology_HDD_db - seems to 'just work' unsure about this 'smart storage' as my Syno is too old anyway :)
- kstrauser 3mo ago
  I think it's amazing that this project exists, and I have much respect for the authors. Well done. Still, I don't want to get stuck lying to my OS to make its features work on my hardware, and I don't want to have to trust that no future OS updates will remove that workaround. It feels like depending on a jailbroken phone. It's your phone: of course you have the right to do whatever you want with the hardware. I wouldn't want to count on the jailbreak continuing to work, though.

vkaku 3mo ago

It's easy to build one yourself. Just don't buy from vendors if you can't run your own software. It's that simple. I've run two NAS appliances for 15+ years now, and never had to worry about any of this, because I just run good old Community Linux or BSD on it. I can plug whatever PCIe card I want, as much storage as I want and from whom I want.

itchingsphynx 3mo ago

I agree on most points, except perhaps for the expectation of compute and RAM since NAS = ‘network attached storage.’ I’ve had a HP N40L for 15 years and every time I see the current offerings I hope I don’t have to look for hardware soon; it’s been such a great homelab server. After FreeNAS > TrueNAS Core, I now roll my own FreeBSD. It felt like a great leap into the deep end going from GUI to CLI, but I haven’t once looked back.

quailfarmer 3mo ago

On the first point specifically, everyone is going to need to wrap their heads around memory being more tightly integrated with compute in future generations. The modular form factor restricts DRAM speed, bus width, hurts reliability and cost. Memory modules provide flexibility, but the cost is real. I suspect in the future we will get better at re-balling memory ICs.

xela79 3mo ago

> Software Homogenization and Interface Uniformity how is this a negative? I would say, please do more like ugreen and support alternative OS, provide drivers and integrations.