Not to mention the sheer amount of security vulnerabilities they constantly have in their products. I never recommend QNAP for that reason. Out of the box solutions I only recommend Synology. Selfbuild route is uraid and my personal fav. Truenas scale.
More than likely. Since the description clearly states "8x3.5 HDD Hot-Swap drive bays." It's not the only case of similar form factor that you can get 8 hot swap drive bays. There are literally tons of NAS case designs to choose from.
I've built every NAS/home server I've ever had. There's lots of options out there for the case as well. You could take an SFF Mini ITX case with a single 5 1/4" drive bay and put an icy dock 8 x 2.5" SATA backplane in it. Don't know if icy dock (brand) is widely available in Europe...
Just pointing out that if you imagine it (form factor with 8 hot swappable drives) there's probably a solution to build it from scratch.
You could do all that, yes - but that's not really "replacing" a Synology IMHO. The point is that you don't really have to think about putting it all together correctly - put the drives in, install your OS of choice and that's it.
Man, I have GOT to try Truenas Scale one of these days. I see it recommended so often, but I was just too used to a standard Linux ecosystem to bother learning something new. I am assuming it gets you closer to the feel of a pre-built NAS during administration tasks compared to Cockpit and a SSH session lmao.
I think I am just always afraid of being locked into a specific way of doing things by a vendor. I feel like I would get annoyed if something that I could do easily on standard Linux was harder to do on Truenas Scale.
For sure. It's basically a NAS software appliance. You just need to bring your own x86 hardware. Truenas core was good, but they will stop actively developing soon in favor for scale.
I have it running both hardware (backup) as well as virtualized (with a special sas/sata card as PCI pass thru). Works like a charm.