4 ms·

This architectural shift eliminates the user’s ability to expand memory capacity as self-hosting demands grow, effectively putting a permanent ceiling on runnin

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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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.
    - lostlogin 2mo ago
      The rumoured Apple server (for their use, not for customers) makes me sad. I want one. Apple silicon with some other os would be an amazing low power nas.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Do you run services on your home router, your cellphone, and your microwave just because they have CPUs?
  - fragmede 2mo ago
    My microwave, unfortunately, is closed source. However my home router runs a web server, and my cellphone runs a service called Airdrop, when I turn it on.
  - ericd 2mo ago
    Your home router is a pretty good place to run some services… Highly recommend running VPN so you can access your home network from anywhere.
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      Notably, that is routing.
      - ericd 2mo ago
        Heh well and encryption/decryption.
  - throw2ih020 2mo ago
    Plenty of people run ad-blocking DNS on their router, or mesh VPN software. Handy for devices where you can't install an ad blocker directly, and for working around CGNAT issues due to IPv4 exhaustion. If my microwave had programmable firmware I'd absolutely reprogram it, get rid of the annoying clock and make my own quick buttons for my most common meals...
podocarp 2mo ago
Well that's just for home use. Say a small to medium enterprise needing a shared drive. Or even things like say video editing you might need a 10G connection. Furthermore for most it's just a hobby so there's no right or wrong, if you can live with the noise and power of old enterprise gear then kudos to you, or if you think a raspberry pi with a sata hat works then go ahead
- fuzzfactor 2mo ago
  >if you think a raspberry pi with a sata hat works then go ahead With the price of drives right now I think I'll have to settle for a blueberry pie and a cowboy hat :\
  - fuzzfactor 2mo ago
    Sorry to hurt so many net (and gross) peoples' feelings with my casual underestimation :( Depending on the number of drives, you could instead probably afford some fancy cowboy footwear to go with your alternative purchases too. Also depending on your preferred boot environment of course . . .
close04 2mo ago
For business it should be all storage. But for home use the best is all-in-one. A home user doesn’t benefit from specialization of equipment, just brings them more headaches managing more stuff. One device that has storage and can also run Plex, Immich, HA in a single package makes the lives much easier for those who have to take care of the IT in the house especially of they’re not “IT people”.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  That isn't a NAS, then. It's a home server.
  - jasode 2mo ago
    >That isn't a NAS, then. It's a home server. It's just 2 different usages of "NAS" for different contexts. In a business/enterprise environment, "NAS" is a more constrained definition of a single-purpose rack that only does storage duties. However, in a home environment, "NAS" is a fuzzier definition to also include running "apps" like Home Assistant, Plex/Jellyfish media, or webcam video analysis. Either in containers or vms. Both the vendors Synology/QNAP/UGREEN and the consumers use "NAS" in this looser definition. If you go out on Google search or Amazon to search for a "home server" to buy, you will get "NAS appliances" as the results. This happens because a NAS in a home usage has plenty of idle CPU leftover to run extra apps that's not strictly just storage. Buying a 2nd computer to run apps just to satisfy the NAS to remain as a "pure" NAS is a waste of money. Similar situation to "routers". Business/enterprise routers are single purpose. But home routers from the ISP are fuzzier definitions. They also include a DHCP service, a firewall, and a Wi-Fi access point. Maybe the home versions are not "true pure routers" in the official OSI 7-layer sense. Ok, but home users still call them "routers".
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      I suppose it's like how nobody ever calls each other on a "phone" any more but we still call them "phones".
    - PunchyHamster 2mo ago
crabbone 2mo ago
You missed the point the author really complains about: soldered in memory chips create a single point of failure. What you quoted needs to be seen in the context of what author calls "increasing media demands". I.e. the author believes that while the way the system is configured might be OK today, it won't be OK in the future.
- Ekaros 2mo ago
  Memory chips failing to me sounds like extremely bizarre fear. Memory has been extremely reliable for long time now. It is much more likely any other component on same mainboard failing than memory.
  - crabbone 2mo ago
    It still makes it a single point of failure...
    - Ekaros 2mo ago
      Every single component in NAS which breaking stops operation is single point of failure. So should those all too be socket mounted?
      - crabbone 2mo ago
        That's a tautology... But, maybe if I try to salvage what you were trying to say: while failures are a fact of life, higher-quality products will try to minimize and mitigate more of them. Making more components replaceable, is the direction to improve resiliency, and therefore quality of the system. It could be impossible or highly impractical to make everything socket-mounted, but making more components socket-mounted is certainly a way to make a better product.
TacticalCoder 2mo ago
> 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" I disagree. And we can at least discuss whether a NAS that doesn't have ECC is that much of a NAS or not. I'd take an old Xeon server with 64 GB of ECC memory, run its CPU in powersave mode, and slap TrueNAS (with ZFS) on it any day over buying a dedicated NAS. YMMV but actual professional server gear, with ECC memory, is to me more of a NAS than a consumer NAS. And nothing forces you to run a "full server": you can dedicate a real server to be only a NAS and slap the lowest consuming Xeon on it, which moreover you can run with a powersaving CPU governor. Slap a 10 Gbit/s ethernet NIC in it and call it a day. It shall be more reliable too. You can of course cosplay with a consumer NAS but the real thing is better. P.S: mine is a HP Z440 with a 14-cores Xeon (so a workstation, not a server: the advantage is that it's totally quiet)
- maccard 2mo ago
  That's pretty mental. Those Xeon E5's are 50w at idle, plus 10w for the 10Gb Ethernet, before you add any storage. A core 3 N300 is 1/10 of the power usage, for ~85% of the performance. Integrity at the filesystem level is required _anyway_ but if you want ECC ram, there's a bunch of AMD processors with similar power usage.
  - RamRodification 2mo ago
    Just slap some solar panels on it!
    - maccard 2mo ago
      https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ There’s a handful of these projects about. You’d need a moderate battery but it’s just about doable!
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
folkrav 2mo ago
I run some light services on my NAS cause well, in the end, the distinction in naming is arbitrary at best, it’s a computer, and I use it for computer things. In an ideal world where I can afford separate purpose-built machines for everything, I’ll have a storage-only NAS, but it’s a computer I have that also happens to have many hard drive bays. Being able to service my own machines shouldn’t be all that surprising either.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
windexh8er 2mo ago
Then, sorry, but you don't understand today's NAS market. All it takes is looking at the products QNAP, Minisforum, TruNAS, UnRAID and many more have been putting out for years - and it sells well. Nobody wants more infrastructure than they need and a well powered NAS is a great place for homelabbers and SMB to invest. I just recommended an N5 Air [0] to a friend because it's got a powerful CPU, can expand to 96GB of RAM, has a great mix of NVME and HDD and has a PCI slot they can run an Intel A310 in for local transcode. It's the perfect Proxmox host to run everything they'd want to do including local services but also fault tolerant storage for a reasonable price. [0] https://youtu.be/y8WFoV4ZSTg https://youtu.be/y8WFoV4ZSTg
mindslight 2mo ago
I think of a modern consumer NAS as a backdoor server that a user buys to solve one problem they know they have, plus a whole bunch of additional problems they didn't know they have... A critical part of of the vanguard in the war against proprietary centralizing webapps.
ButlerianJihad 2mo ago
I think we can all agree that "NAS" for consumers is a marketing term, like "atomic clock". Anyone who works in an office with a NAS may come to admire its functions, and want the same experience at home. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetApp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetApp When I think of NAS, I think of Network Appliance. Even in the mid-90s they were already well-known as the makers of the most formidable turnkey NAS that an enterprise could have. They are so awesome and specialized that I never even worked near one. Their systems were called "filers" and they have proprietary filesystems with proprietary kernels and CLI, that present with an NFS interface, among other things. The Filers are blazingly fast and ultra-high-capacity.
palmotea 2mo ago
> 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. Home NAS machines have often been used as full servers and in the past allowed those upgrades. And it makes sense in a home to have one device that's flexible enough to fill multiple roles, be small, and quiet.

iamshs 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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.
  - lostlogin 2mo ago
    The rumoured Apple server (for their use, not for customers) makes me sad. I want one. Apple silicon with some other os would be an amazing low power nas.
inigyou 2mo ago
Do you run services on your home router, your cellphone, and your microwave just because they have CPUs?
- fragmede 2mo ago
  My microwave, unfortunately, is closed source. However my home router runs a web server, and my cellphone runs a service called Airdrop, when I turn it on.
- ericd 2mo ago
  Your home router is a pretty good place to run some services… Highly recommend running VPN so you can access your home network from anywhere.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Notably, that is routing.
    - ericd 2mo ago
      Heh well and encryption/decryption.
- throw2ih020 2mo ago
  Plenty of people run ad-blocking DNS on their router, or mesh VPN software. Handy for devices where you can't install an ad blocker directly, and for working around CGNAT issues due to IPv4 exhaustion. If my microwave had programmable firmware I'd absolutely reprogram it, get rid of the annoying clock and make my own quick buttons for my most common meals...

podocarp 2mo ago

Well that's just for home use. Say a small to medium enterprise needing a shared drive. Or even things like say video editing you might need a 10G connection. Furthermore for most it's just a hobby so there's no right or wrong, if you can live with the noise and power of old enterprise gear then kudos to you, or if you think a raspberry pi with a sata hat works then go ahead

fuzzfactor 2mo ago
>if you think a raspberry pi with a sata hat works then go ahead With the price of drives right now I think I'll have to settle for a blueberry pie and a cowboy hat :\
- fuzzfactor 2mo ago
  Sorry to hurt so many net (and gross) peoples' feelings with my casual underestimation :( Depending on the number of drives, you could instead probably afford some fancy cowboy footwear to go with your alternative purchases too. Also depending on your preferred boot environment of course . . .

close04 2mo ago

For business it should be all storage. But for home use the best is all-in-one. A home user doesn’t benefit from specialization of equipment, just brings them more headaches managing more stuff. One device that has storage and can also run Plex, Immich, HA in a single package makes the lives much easier for those who have to take care of the IT in the house especially of they’re not “IT people”.

inigyou 2mo ago
That isn't a NAS, then. It's a home server.
- jasode 2mo ago
  >That isn't a NAS, then. It's a home server. It's just 2 different usages of "NAS" for different contexts. In a business/enterprise environment, "NAS" is a more constrained definition of a single-purpose rack that only does storage duties. However, in a home environment, "NAS" is a fuzzier definition to also include running "apps" like Home Assistant, Plex/Jellyfish media, or webcam video analysis. Either in containers or vms. Both the vendors Synology/QNAP/UGREEN and the consumers use "NAS" in this looser definition. If you go out on Google search or Amazon to search for a "home server" to buy, you will get "NAS appliances" as the results. This happens because a NAS in a home usage has plenty of idle CPU leftover to run extra apps that's not strictly just storage. Buying a 2nd computer to run apps just to satisfy the NAS to remain as a "pure" NAS is a waste of money. Similar situation to "routers". Business/enterprise routers are single purpose. But home routers from the ISP are fuzzier definitions. They also include a DHCP service, a firewall, and a Wi-Fi access point. Maybe the home versions are not "true pure routers" in the official OSI 7-layer sense. Ok, but home users still call them "routers".
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    I suppose it's like how nobody ever calls each other on a "phone" any more but we still call them "phones".
  - PunchyHamster 2mo ago

crabbone 2mo ago

You missed the point the author really complains about: soldered in memory chips create a single point of failure. What you quoted needs to be seen in the context of what author calls "increasing media demands". I.e. the author believes that while the way the system is configured might be OK today, it won't be OK in the future.

Ekaros 2mo ago
Memory chips failing to me sounds like extremely bizarre fear. Memory has been extremely reliable for long time now. It is much more likely any other component on same mainboard failing than memory.
- crabbone 2mo ago
  It still makes it a single point of failure...
  - Ekaros 2mo ago
    Every single component in NAS which breaking stops operation is single point of failure. So should those all too be socket mounted?
    - crabbone 2mo ago
      That's a tautology... But, maybe if I try to salvage what you were trying to say: while failures are a fact of life, higher-quality products will try to minimize and mitigate more of them. Making more components replaceable, is the direction to improve resiliency, and therefore quality of the system. It could be impossible or highly impractical to make everything socket-mounted, but making more components socket-mounted is certainly a way to make a better product.

TacticalCoder 2mo ago

> 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" I disagree. And we can at least discuss whether a NAS that doesn't have ECC is that much of a NAS or not. I'd take an old Xeon server with 64 GB of ECC memory, run its CPU in powersave mode, and slap TrueNAS (with ZFS) on it any day over buying a dedicated NAS. YMMV but actual professional server gear, with ECC memory, is to me more of a NAS than a consumer NAS. And nothing forces you to run a "full server": you can dedicate a real server to be only a NAS and slap the lowest consuming Xeon on it, which moreover you can run with a powersaving CPU governor. Slap a 10 Gbit/s ethernet NIC in it and call it a day. It shall be more reliable too. You can of course cosplay with a consumer NAS but the real thing is better. P.S: mine is a HP Z440 with a 14-cores Xeon (so a workstation, not a server: the advantage is that it's totally quiet)

maccard 2mo ago
That's pretty mental. Those Xeon E5's are 50w at idle, plus 10w for the 10Gb Ethernet, before you add any storage. A core 3 N300 is 1/10 of the power usage, for ~85% of the performance. Integrity at the filesystem level is required _anyway_ but if you want ECC ram, there's a bunch of AMD processors with similar power usage.
- RamRodification 2mo ago
  Just slap some solar panels on it!
  - maccard 2mo ago
    https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ There’s a handful of these projects about. You’d need a moderate battery but it’s just about doable!
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

folkrav 2mo ago

I run some light services on my NAS cause well, in the end, the distinction in naming is arbitrary at best, it’s a computer, and I use it for computer things. In an ideal world where I can afford separate purpose-built machines for everything, I’ll have a storage-only NAS, but it’s a computer I have that also happens to have many hard drive bays. Being able to service my own machines shouldn’t be all that surprising either.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

windexh8er 2mo ago

Then, sorry, but you don't understand today's NAS market. All it takes is looking at the products QNAP, Minisforum, TruNAS, UnRAID and many more have been putting out for years - and it sells well. Nobody wants more infrastructure than they need and a well powered NAS is a great place for homelabbers and SMB to invest. I just recommended an N5 Air [0] to a friend because it's got a powerful CPU, can expand to 96GB of RAM, has a great mix of NVME and HDD and has a PCI slot they can run an Intel A310 in for local transcode. It's the perfect Proxmox host to run everything they'd want to do including local services but also fault tolerant storage for a reasonable price. [0] https://youtu.be/y8WFoV4ZSTg https://youtu.be/y8WFoV4ZSTg

mindslight 2mo ago

I think of a modern consumer NAS as a backdoor server that a user buys to solve one problem they know they have, plus a whole bunch of additional problems they didn't know they have... A critical part of of the vanguard in the war against proprietary centralizing webapps.

ButlerianJihad 2mo ago

I think we can all agree that "NAS" for consumers is a marketing term, like "atomic clock". Anyone who works in an office with a NAS may come to admire its functions, and want the same experience at home. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetApp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetApp When I think of NAS, I think of Network Appliance. Even in the mid-90s they were already well-known as the makers of the most formidable turnkey NAS that an enterprise could have. They are so awesome and specialized that I never even worked near one. Their systems were called "filers" and they have proprietary filesystems with proprietary kernels and CLI, that present with an NFS interface, among other things. The Filers are blazingly fast and ultra-high-capacity.

palmotea 2mo ago

> 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. Home NAS machines have often been used as full servers and in the past allowed those upgrades. And it makes sense in a home to have one device that's flexible enough to fill multiple roles, be small, and quiet.