I would worry much more about running a custom freebsd install before considering the reliability of the hardware.
There’s no good and bad hardware (to a certain degree), but the hardware you linked is all ‘good’ unless you get unlucky and something comes dead on arrival or you get a lightning strike or a case of bad electronics luck. At that point it’s the quality of support that counts more that the quality of the hardware. If the hardware is somewhat unreliable, but you get excellent support that gets you a spare part/fixes it without it taking two months and without your data leaving your premises, then I would take that over stellar hardware that you won’t be able to get a spare and/or a replacement should it fail …
I’ve seen similar sentiments about anything in the tech space. You’re less likely to hear from people who have had good experiences. Then those who have had bad ones amplify them. At the end of the day, you gotta do what’s best for you. Not trying to sell you on QNAP really, only wanted to share my personal experience.
FreeBSD handbook is one of the best pieces of documentation around, and BSDs generally are very well documented and comfortable systems to run(especially on servers). I used to administer a server running OpenBSD and it was so smooth and easy, that I wish I could use it for this, but the lack of ZFS precludes that. NetBSD is also sweet, but it’s ZFS support isn’t up to scratch just yet, so I’ll go with FreeBSD.
Also I don’t think I’ll have to install a ton of additional stuff(if any - I just need ZFS and sshd), and I expect that I’ll be running the stock kernel, so I don’t think that qualifies it as “custom”.
I get that what you’re saying is that both QNAP and iXsystems have teams of engineers working on their software(fixing, updating and providing support for it), but their solutions are orders of magnitude more complex than what I want or need.
I’m comfortable using the command line and reading man pages and howtos and other forms of documentation when I have questions, conversely, it’s the graphical interfaces that I find superfluous and sometimes confusing(and both TrueNAS and QNAP software are built with this kind of usage in mind).
I understand the risks, and I get that I’ll have to be my own tech support, and I accept that, but then again voiding the warranty is the first thing I do when I buy new tech, so I’m used to that.
I really hope that all this didn’t make me sound like an elitist or something, it’s just how my experience with computers influenced my current approach. My first OS was MS DOS - so that was command line only, then I moved to Windows(which wasn’t great, but 3.11 was just a graphical overlay, and 9x still allowed me to use my MS DOS chops), and when I was 12 I’ve installed Slackware(I’ve tried RedHat, but it sucked, Slackware was amazing though). Back then I didn’t have access to the internet, so if I wanted to make something work I had to use the documentation that was included with the system(and even MS DOS included very nice documentation - both for the OS and the BASIC language).
And I’m very grateful that you did share your experience! It wasn’t my intention to devalue it in any way.
I’m glad that you’ve shared that you’re happy with QNAP products, because it might be a much needed counterbalance to the amplified voices that you’ve mentioned.
I hope they work well for you, but in the company I worked for, we were all-in on QNAP. They were cheaper than alternatives is all I can say, but my colleagues told me they sucked, so that’s what impression I had on them. I was just a helpdesk at the time, so it was a while ago, but given that I know personally people who worked with them and I trust their opinions, I won’t be using QNAP NASes.
But for a NAS, I prefer things that I have more control over anyway.
I get your point, my point was that with the current quality of hardware in general, either you’re unlucky and get a non working componenbt from the start (or DHL kills the hardware by tossing it around) or you get a lightning strike, or the probability of it failing is less than you screwing up something while doing an update/maintenance/trying out something on your platform, even if you have decades of experience. This is from someone on the same boat actually, I was just tryng to make the point that worrying about the reliabiliy of the harware should not be a factor in your choice, or it should have minimal weight …
I am not questioning you willingness/ability to roll your own custom NAS and for your GUI allergy condition … again, to each its own
Did they ‘suck’ because the hardwar was constantly failing and you couldn’t get support, or did they ‘suck’ because the OS was losing data, or did they ‘suck’ because they were a pain to administer for your use case, or were they constantly hanging on you?
These are all different kind of suckness, and I would be wary of any tech that sums all of if on a single metric. To me it looks more like a PEBCAK than an indicator of the hardware/software actually not performinig …
I don’t remember what problems they had with them, so I can’t say, but given that we had 2 Gentoo admins, with experience with everything from Samba, to DNS, to DBs, to Asterisk PBX, to web servers, to Linux storage arrays (the most important factor I would say, when talking about NASes), to networking and more behind their back, I would definitely not attribute it to being a user error on my ex-colleagues part. In fact, I find it highly unlikely.
Unfortunately, I left the company long ago, so I don’t know what purchasing decisions they made afterwards, maybe they continued buying QNAPs, but I did hear they had plans to move part of the infrastructure to Azure.
and for your GUI allergy condition … again, to each its own