QNAP at least used to make pretty powerful NASs. I had one with an older Xeon in it that I bought in like 2015 that at the time crushed Plex streaming. Not sure if they still do, I also moved to Unraid and will never look back, it’s exactly what I need and none of what I don’t (literally, raid. Don’t care about IOPs).
Actually ran Unraid on the Xeon QNAP for a year or so before building my own box.
When adding/removing disks you do have to rebuild parity, but it’s not the end of the world and it handles it automatically. I run parity checks pretty often anyway (every other week) and it takes the same amount of time.
I just like the Unraid UI and Docker implementation tbh. I used to run everything off Portainer/Compose on my QNAP which was great, but these days I am lazy and having an Update All button is 🤌
I run UnRAID myself as well. I don’t need raw performance, just stupid amounts of storage for my data hoard, and being able to slap in whatever disk has the best $:gb whenever I need to expand has been such a nice change.
I do have a SSD pool to run my containers and separate one for drive caching as well.
I’m just here to +1 Northern Journey. I couldn’t put this game down once I started. It’s weird AF, and I loved it utterly.
In elemental school we had to write instructions on how to make a pb&j sandwich. The teacher then acted out your instructions literally, without adding or removing a step. I don’t think there was a single sandwich made that day.