Do you like QNAP products? I have experience with a few Synology NASes, and was looking at QNAP’s media center NAS products, and they seem nice. It seems like QNAP has a bit more open source support, which I definitely like. Ubuntu Linux Station looks neat, like a first-party supported integrated Ubuntu Docker container? That QNAP’s web management and the device itself runs Linux under the hood is awesome; this may be the case as well with Synology products, so I don’t mean to draw a comparison where there is none.
I'm not a person who uses to return products, and I had mine for just two weeks. It was constantly reading/writing to disk. All the time. It wasn't indexing: the QNAP system has a lot of small services and some of them write logs to disk or do god knows what. Given the particular architecture of the NAS processor I wasn't able to install cli tools to analyze the problem further, but at this point I realized the NAS wasn't doing what I wanted in the first place: ease my life and allow me to automate backups.
I ended up adding one of the disks to my PC and the other to a home server.
I must admit though that the QNAP solutions look very helpful if you disregard the abusive disk R/W activity and the inconsistent UI. You may be able to set up complex backup schemes quite fast with it.
If you are interested in virtualization and advanced usage, be sure to get one with an ARM processor at least, because it may be difficult to get packages for it on other obscure architectures.
I've got a QNAP TS-451 and it works, but I don't find that the added features are really worth anything. I basically use it as a dumb storage server (NFS, SMB, and iSCSI) and for that it works really well. The only bit of smarts I use is the Hybrid Backup Sync utility to back up important folders to external drives and, when I get around to setting it up, some kind of off-site backup.
I've just found too many odd limitations with the device to use it for much more than that. For example, you can set up VLANs and you can bind services to specific physical network interfaces, but you can't bind a service to a VLAN interface. This is what made me give up on the added features.
Also, be aware that some added features have moved to a subscription model[0]. And, if you expose your QNAP to the internet, there's a risk of getting malware[1]. On the plus side, this has made them open up a tiny bit[2][3].
I’ve a 10 bay system populated with 4TB drives that I use as a dumb data dump in RAID6. They’re okay systems, but as others have said they come with a lot of useless complexity. At a previous job had an 8 bay system that had a dodgy backplane that was a pain to deal with.
I’ve run FreeNAS as well, but I found there was something strange about the involvement of iXsystems I couldn’t put my finger on. It just didn’t seem professionally done on the web site, or the web GUI. It was 98% of the way there functionality-wise, but the GUI was just overwhelming. Personal preference I guess. Perhaps there are other themes, and being open source, I’m sure it can be configured to my liking. I am glad the project exists, all that said. I just don’t know if it’s something I can sell to a client. I am more than comfortable running it myself, and have done so; to catch network scan jobs for SMBv1 only MFPs, for instance.
Well, they almost had a way better GUI which I was using in beta, until the lead developer on that and iXsystems got into a big spat and he left, causing iXsystems to have to quickly slap together an upgrade to their old UI themselves, so...
