“NAS” itself is an enshitification
Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified
131–140 of 178 posts
Re: Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified
#132Are there any good out of the box NAS options?
Re: Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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”.
That isn't a NAS, then. It's a home server.
Exactly! But don’t let the terminology bog you down. There is no market for single purpose (exclusively NAS, exclusively router, etc.) specialized devices outside of enterprise.
We call it a NAS like we call the general purpose computer in our pockets a “phone”. Or the home server that connects to our ISP a “router”.
Re: Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified
#134This 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.
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.
Re: Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified
#135I 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.
Re: Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified
#136You 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.
Re: Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified
#137This 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.
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
>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 :\
Re: Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified
#138I 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.
>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 Silverston…
I got a UGREEN DXP6800 about two weeks ago on which I installed
FreeBSD, and was just noticing today how slow the USB is when I saw
this article mentioning a possible explanation (like ten times slower
than when I plug the same external SSD into another machine). Have you
noticed USB bandwidth issues in your setup or is it likely just some
misconfiguration on my part?
Re: Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Do you run services on your home router, your cellphone, and your microwave just because they have CPUs?
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...
Re: Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified
#140Are there any good out of the box NAS options?
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.