After couple years using a Qnap NAS I'm seriously considering to replace it with a cheap mac. Primarily this is because my Qnap keeps running into some sort of bug nobody could help me fix, where it would go into some kind of low power mode that limits transfer speed to like 300kb yes lower case b, and you need to open the web UI or reboot the NAS to kick it back into normal speed. And I just think I would not buy another NAS that could potentially have this kind of bug that never gets addressed.
But other than that, I just find how mainstream NAS products are absurdly catered toward enterprise and super nerds, which are not only of no use to me, they can often be annoying. For example NAS nerds love weird disk formats, they want stuff like zfs which I don't understand why but it probably has something to do with snapshots. And I just don't understand why regular home users should care about that stuff, you could just ignore it of course, but the issue is any disk you used in the system is now in some strange file format that can't be read by a normal computer/pc. So yes while in theory because of your super nerdy RAID array, should a drive fail you can just swap in a new one, rebuilt the array and book your data is all back. In actual practice, that doesn't ever happen, what really would help me, is if my NAS died, I have a way to get the data from those disks, without having to purchase a new NAS!
Speaking of RAIDs, I'm so done with that stuff, because disks simply don't fail from my experience. I've had computers for 20years+ and I literally have never had a drive fail, but I have already had one Qnap NAS fail in just 5 years. I've had SSDs already at 0% health running for years and still did not lose any data. I don't just yolo it of course I run periodic backups, I just don't see the point of an RAID array that is essentially constantly fail-safe with your most up to date changes. That RAID array does however have a cost as previously mentioned, but also, you need to sink a big one-time cost into many number of drives at the same size, which can't be upgraded unless you replace the whole array.
I just feel like running a NAS today is like daily driving an APC, yea theoretically you are bullet proof, but who's ever going to shoot at your on the street? However if your APC breaks down on the road nobody can help you, and you are constantly driving much slower than everyone else, having all kinds of troubles for that completely pointless overkill protection.
Just did some test runs with my Macbook pro and everything seem to work great, I can easily max out 1gbe speeds on my 1gbe tb4 hub while transferring to windows PC. It only goes around 7MB/s for iPhone but who knows maybe there's some wi-fi limitation, still perfectly good enough for any reasonable video streaming. Dedicated NAS products are supposed to be optimized for that task alone but at this point the difference in performance and efficiency is simply too great, when a Mac is 10x faster and also lower power at the same price point, I'd rather get a mac and run remote desktop on it, rather than what is theoretically much less resource intensive webUI on a Qnap/Synology.
The only potential issue I'm seeing is the cost of drive enclosures, a thunderbolt quad NVME enclosure can be pricy but I think full speed is totally unnecessary for a NAS considering the ethernet speed limit, you can get a quad NVME dock at 10gb speed for like $50 which is certainly fast enough. However I'm just not so sure of the reliability of it since nvme drives essentially have their own SOC, plus the chip on the dock, there's so many interaction going on between big chips with complex firmware who knows where there might be a bug or incompatibility?
But other than that, I just find how mainstream NAS products are absurdly catered toward enterprise and super nerds, which are not only of no use to me, they can often be annoying. For example NAS nerds love weird disk formats, they want stuff like zfs which I don't understand why but it probably has something to do with snapshots. And I just don't understand why regular home users should care about that stuff, you could just ignore it of course, but the issue is any disk you used in the system is now in some strange file format that can't be read by a normal computer/pc. So yes while in theory because of your super nerdy RAID array, should a drive fail you can just swap in a new one, rebuilt the array and book your data is all back. In actual practice, that doesn't ever happen, what really would help me, is if my NAS died, I have a way to get the data from those disks, without having to purchase a new NAS!
Speaking of RAIDs, I'm so done with that stuff, because disks simply don't fail from my experience. I've had computers for 20years+ and I literally have never had a drive fail, but I have already had one Qnap NAS fail in just 5 years. I've had SSDs already at 0% health running for years and still did not lose any data. I don't just yolo it of course I run periodic backups, I just don't see the point of an RAID array that is essentially constantly fail-safe with your most up to date changes. That RAID array does however have a cost as previously mentioned, but also, you need to sink a big one-time cost into many number of drives at the same size, which can't be upgraded unless you replace the whole array.
I just feel like running a NAS today is like daily driving an APC, yea theoretically you are bullet proof, but who's ever going to shoot at your on the street? However if your APC breaks down on the road nobody can help you, and you are constantly driving much slower than everyone else, having all kinds of troubles for that completely pointless overkill protection.
Just did some test runs with my Macbook pro and everything seem to work great, I can easily max out 1gbe speeds on my 1gbe tb4 hub while transferring to windows PC. It only goes around 7MB/s for iPhone but who knows maybe there's some wi-fi limitation, still perfectly good enough for any reasonable video streaming. Dedicated NAS products are supposed to be optimized for that task alone but at this point the difference in performance and efficiency is simply too great, when a Mac is 10x faster and also lower power at the same price point, I'd rather get a mac and run remote desktop on it, rather than what is theoretically much less resource intensive webUI on a Qnap/Synology.
The only potential issue I'm seeing is the cost of drive enclosures, a thunderbolt quad NVME enclosure can be pricy but I think full speed is totally unnecessary for a NAS considering the ethernet speed limit, you can get a quad NVME dock at 10gb speed for like $50 which is certainly fast enough. However I'm just not so sure of the reliability of it since nvme drives essentially have their own SOC, plus the chip on the dock, there's so many interaction going on between big chips with complex firmware who knows where there might be a bug or incompatibility?
