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Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified

nascompares.com

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Re: Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified

#71

Post by throwawayffffas »

bob1029 wrote: post #11

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 an…

I don't know dude I am running a NAS for my home, it has taken minimal maintenance. The main benefit is it's local on my LAN, so speed and latency are dictated by the drives and my switch not whatever is happening outside my home.

Re: Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified

#72

Post by crabbone »

zeafoamrun wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Re: Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified

#73

Post by Joel_Mckay »

Galanwe wrote: post #44
zeafoamrun wrote: post #4

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.

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 comp…

Most have developed abstractions to reduce platform and service specific dependency:

https://github.com/rclone/rclone

From a maintenance perspective, one must not assume a NAS is a backup, but rather a high-bandwidth local/VPN file share.

* maids unplug equipment to vacuum offices (yes, this does really happen.)

* drives fail eventually, bit-rot is a thing, and filesystems evolve over time

* hardware specific features will always become a problem eventually. No one will check a degraded RAID/ZFS setup without service telemetry.

Practical options:

* sshfs + JBOD mount is fine for most home win11/bsd/linux/macOS/iOS/android users, as simple things have less failure modes and less time-cost to repair.

* fault tolerant systems like CephFS are usually too complex for home users. However, https://www.45drives.com offers a support option for small offices.

* ZFS has a lot of tradeoffs, and most people don't use the better key features (auto-snap-shotting and docker/VM deduplication.) In some cases even F2FS will also work fine, and probably last a bit longer with consumer flash drives.

* I agree the IT support issue with distros like TrueNAS or openmediavault becomes a popularity contest over what features are supported long-term.

It is often better to use a generic OpenBSD or Debian OS installation, and run the rclone network share abstractions on PC/Mac clients. Android and iPhone both have sftp clients for auto media backups over router VPN as well..

Lightning always wins every argument, an offsite VPN to remote file-backup is usually wise. =3

Re: Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified

#75

Post by lostlogin »

izacus wrote: post #66
dijit wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified

#76

Post by stavros »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #68
stavros wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Nightly? what happens in between and how many different sites? What happens if your Internet goes down one night? How many parity drives do you have? Will the array survive replacing a drive or will another one die during the sync will you lose data if that happens? S3 takes replication seriously to a professional level, when you upload a file to S3 the chance of s3 losing it is capped by the chance of a civilization…

Yes. Nothing, one site. The backup gets taken the next night. One. Yes. Yes.

What happens if your drive dies just as you're uploading the file to S3? Why are we comparing the durability of S3 to the reliability of my Internet connection, instead of to the durability of rsync.net?

Re: Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified

#77

Post by Joel_Mckay »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #62
Galanwe wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

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 WireG…

Almost all off-the-shelf consumer grade NAS appliances are running unmaintainable OS yocto builds already 2 years out of support, and a list of CVE under active exploitation.

The only really functional OSS NAS exception for small offices is the CephFS builds from https://www.45drives.com , and that is because of included support services. =3

Re: Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified

#78

Post by lostlogin »

ksec wrote: post #20

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.

> I still think Apple should have bring their AirPort Express and Time Capsule back.

But for the love of God, please fix Time Machine.

Re: Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified

#79

Post by dmayle »

Aerolfos wrote: post #50
blooalien wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 fi…

I have seen a few occasional sites that are even worse than this one.. Not only don't you get a reject all, you get two classes of settings, the default "types", and "trusted partners", and for trusted partners, about a third of them have what's called "legitimate interest" turned on, which means "we legitimately think we can share your data with this people after leading you to believe we haven't, and that's ok", and there are a hundred or more partners you have to scroll through and disable this for

Re: Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified

#80

Post by whyagaindavid »

lm2s wrote: post #38
whyagaindavid wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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.

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