I have zero trust in QNAP. QNAP knowingly sold several NASes with a known clock-drift defect in their Intel J1900 CPUs and then refused to provide any support. A bunch of community members had to figure out how to solder a resistor to temporarily revive their bricked NASes in order to retrieve their data. https://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?t=135089
I had a TS-453 Pro and my friend had a TS-451. Both mine and his exhibited this issue and refused to boot. After this debacle and the extreme apathy from their support, I vowed to never buy a pre-built NAS.
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.
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.
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.
Do it anyway and put an x86 OS on one of the "standard UEFI" versions. There's no other Hardware better on the market for this - even self build isn't going to come close, there's simply no case with 8 hotswap slots (for example).