maxbraketorque
Very Senior Member
When considering a NAS purchase, I suggest considering a mini-PC based NAS running your favorite desktop computer OS. The price of a quality mini-PC and other required HW is on par with mid-range NAS boxes, but mini-PC hardware specs will blow away pretty much any retail NAS box. The other factor in favor of a mini-PC approach is the wide range of quality software to perform pretty much any task you want.
The trade-off of the mini-PC approach compared to a retail NAS box is that you have to figure out all the hardware and software pieces yourself. I spent pretty much an entire weekend figuring this out. But in my experience, the total time invested is much less than the time I spent trying to figure out software solutions for things I wanted my retail NAS box to do.
There are the Unraid and TrueNAS options which are the mini-PC approach running a specialized OS. I consider these somewhat of a middle ground between a retail NAS box and a mini-PC running a desktop OS. Unraid/TrueNAS offer better built-in data integrity support than a desktop OS, but it requires going down the rabbit hole of learning how to use these OSes and the available software.
After switching over to a mini-PC based setup running a desktop OS, I've found that all my backup operations complete in 1/10th the time using the exact same drives in the same RAID configuration. Its simply due to the much more powerful hardware and well written software. And there is a quality app for pretty much any feature I want.
The trade-off of the mini-PC approach compared to a retail NAS box is that you have to figure out all the hardware and software pieces yourself. I spent pretty much an entire weekend figuring this out. But in my experience, the total time invested is much less than the time I spent trying to figure out software solutions for things I wanted my retail NAS box to do.
There are the Unraid and TrueNAS options which are the mini-PC approach running a specialized OS. I consider these somewhat of a middle ground between a retail NAS box and a mini-PC running a desktop OS. Unraid/TrueNAS offer better built-in data integrity support than a desktop OS, but it requires going down the rabbit hole of learning how to use these OSes and the available software.
After switching over to a mini-PC based setup running a desktop OS, I've found that all my backup operations complete in 1/10th the time using the exact same drives in the same RAID configuration. Its simply due to the much more powerful hardware and well written software. And there is a quality app for pretty much any feature I want.
