Thanks Synology, but it's too late. I have found out TrueNAS and ASUSTOR (which can run TrueNAS if I want to). I'll continue from that path.
Thanks for all the fish, that was an enlightening experience.
OTOH, I wish them luck. They look fine for un-techy folks to store their data locally. Would like them to stick around. Also, competition is always good.
Same - replaced my smaller Synology with a UGREEN, put TrueNAS on it first thing, runs great. The HDD thing was only the final nail in the coffin, but before that, there were plenty of ridiculous "upgrades" that made products worse than in the previous generation. Literally removing features, or continuing to use the same outdated hardware. That's what companies do that don't think they have competition.
ASUSTOR's latest gen hardware is ridiculous. Ryzen processors, upgradeable ECC RAM, 4xHDD + 4xNVMe, 10GbE plus a PCIe slot...
You need to add an external GPU for TrueNAS installation, but they have an official video for that. On top of that, they connected the flash which stores the original firmware to its own USB port, and you can disable it. Preventing both interference and protecting the firmware from accidental erasure.
All over great design.
Yes, it's not cheap, but it's almost enterprise class hardware for home, and that's a good thing.
ASUSTOR looks interesting but none of their desktop units appear have PCIe expansion slots so you can't put a SFP28 card in there. It might be possible via expensive USB4 adapter.
I misremembered that Gen3 hardware had a spare PCIe slot, my bad.
You can either forego NVMe slots (which looks like an add-on card on [0]) and get the slot, or use one of the USB4 interfaces. OTOH, it has 2x10GbE on board, you can just media-convert it.
That seems like a lot of effort - is there no ability to boot a custom thumb drive that loads something like an SSH terminal, or dummy display for VNC?
The problem is not getting TrueNAS on a disk. You can do it externally, but you need to disable the on board flash storage and change the boot order from the BIOS.
That box is "just" an I/O optimized PC which can boot without a GPU.
Older hardware with Intel processors have an iGPU on board. You can use the HDMI output on these directly.
Do all the models support ECC ram? If not, does the website say clearly which do?
I've been looking on and off for a smallish NAS for some use, but I'd really like it to have ECC. As it stands, I'm considering more and more compromising on the size aspect and getting some ASRock + AMD combo.
I bought a small ASUSTOR NAS at work to check it out and I like it, it's definitely faster than comparable Synology units, however the camera system is quite underdeveloped compared to Synology. Synology's surveillance station rocks and ASUSTOR has a long way to go in that niche.
Interesting how it seems a bunch of competition entered the market right as they did this as well. Unifi UNAS just came out and looks pretty compelling
Asustor is not new. I remember seeing it at the university (probably) a decade ago. It was a much simpler 4 disk unit without any screens or fancy specs. My professor told that the looks might be deceiving but it was a good unit.
I took a note of them mentally at that point, but their latest gen hardware is something else. Since I'm a sysadmin by trade, having some of the features that I have in the datacenter at home is a compelling proposition for me.
Thanks for all the fish, that was an enlightening experience.
OTOH, I wish them luck. They look fine for un-techy folks to store their data locally. Would like them to stick around. Also, competition is always good.