[ale] DIY NAS vs Boxed NAS?

[Raj Wurttemberg]

I'm very much a DIY person and I've run FreeNAS boxes before. They run great
and they can be fun to toy with.  Now though... family and other real-life
events have gotten me to the point where I just want something that works
and works 24x7. I don't have time to fool around with drives or the
configuration, I just want to slap in a new drive, do a few clicks, and go
back to whatever I was doing. 

I just recently bought a QNAP 453B (
https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/ts-453be ) and my life has been much more
simple.  They Synology offering should be similar (I'm impartial on the
two).

- Dual NICs for port trunking (802.11ab)
- RAID5 or RAID6 support
- Think and thin volumes with on the fly expansion
- User and group security, Access Based Enumeration
- Network access protection
- Samba, NFS, SFTP, AFP, iSCSI, file support
- Network recycle bin
- SNMP
- AD integration 
- iTunes server, Time Machine Server, DLNA media server
- LDAP, SQL, Syslog, tftp, NTP, server
- Backup to AWS, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google, Azure, or another QNAP with
history and versioning
- Volume snapshots
- Real Time Remote Replication to another QNAP
- Phone, e-mail, and, IM alerts
- Power saving on off-times
- Simple (frequent!) firmware updates
- Cloud access to files through myQnap.com
- DDNS, Automatic SSL certificates through Lets Encrypt
- Only draws 30W / Very small form factor

I haven't even gotten into all of the apps you can install either!
Containers, KVM, OpenStanck, OwnCloud, SugarCRM, WordPress, IFTT, Joomla,
MediaWiki, OpenVPN.... sooo many more.

DIY or pre-built... Go with what makes you happy, they're all good! :) 

/Raj

-----Original Message-----
From: Ale <ale-bounces at ale.org> On Behalf Of Alex Carver via Ale
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2018 3:26 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts <ale at ale.org>
Subject: [ale] DIY NAS vs Boxed NAS?

I'm making a plan for some major network and hardware updates over the next
year at home.  One of the things on the list has been a large-ish NAS box
for storing backup images of the various computers, recording video from IP
security cameras, and possibly just having a small shared area for files
that need to be shared among multiple computers and users.

Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology, QNAP,
etc. I wanted to find out what other people would consider doing, whether
they'd just get a boxed device or put together one from a motherboard, some
SATA cards and a case.



One other thing: what file system would you put on top of the array?
EXT4, Brtfs, something else?
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