Exactly. About 10 years ago I wanted to set up a NAS to store a variety of things. I have the knowhow to hand roll just about anything I wanted, but I lacked the desire or time to do so. At the same time, the simple things were tying me to apps or otherwise putting me on rails.
Instead I bought a lower end Synology & stuffed it with some HDs, and it's been pretty fire & forget while satisfying all of my needs. I'm able to mount drives on it from all of the devices in my network. I can use it as a BitTorrent client. I use it to host a Plex server. And a few other odds & ends over time.
Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue, and replacing some HDDs as they were aging out.
All in all it has struck a perfect balance for me. I'll grant that "solder a resistor onto the motherboard" is likely beyond a typical home user but it's also been a lot less fiddling than some home-brew solution.
> Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue
You and I must have a different idea of "fire and forget." I've been running my NAS on a generic Dell running stock Debian for over a decade now, and I've never had to get the soldering iron out to maintain it!
Agreed. it was a pretty freak issue, albeit one that had a well known fix. I stated it here in full disclosure and did state that this was beyond what most people would consider tolerable. And I'll admit that I came very close to throwing it in the garbage and buying a new one.
Still, other than replacing old drives, something that'd happen regardless of solution, that's the only fiddling I ever had to do.
That was almost certainly the Intel Avoton clock degradation issue. It hit Cisco and lots of other networking vendors too. I lost Supermicro and ASRock boards to the same thing. Soldering on the resistor gets the CLK circuit back into spec for a while, but I had an officially-repaired board eventually fail again in the same way after a few more years since it keeps degrading.
That's a good reminder, I forgot about it being temporary. Looks like it was ~6 years before the initial failure, and it's been ~4 years since.
I should start investigating potential migration paths that would allow me to do a HDD migration as that would be ideal. Although it looks like that might be a pain due to some of their OS-level limitations.
I swapped my dead C2750 (Supermicro A1SAi-2750F) board for my cold-spare C3558 (A2SDi-4C-HLN4F) and was right back running again. I guess if you're talking about an appliance it's a little different, but this was just my home firewall/router FreeBSD+PF+Jails machine.
And actually a good reminder for me to eBay up another cold spare, because I totally forgot to.
Same here. Still rocking a DS415+ from 2015. Had to solder a 100ohm resistor to work around the Intel Atom C2000 flaw. Has had a new set of spinning rust in that time too. It's also connected to UPS so will power down if there's an extended outage. Stuck on DSM 7.1 but it does the job.
Instead I bought a lower end Synology & stuffed it with some HDs, and it's been pretty fire & forget while satisfying all of my needs. I'm able to mount drives on it from all of the devices in my network. I can use it as a BitTorrent client. I use it to host a Plex server. And a few other odds & ends over time.
Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue, and replacing some HDDs as they were aging out.
All in all it has struck a perfect balance for me. I'll grant that "solder a resistor onto the motherboard" is likely beyond a typical home user but it's also been a lot less fiddling than some home-brew solution.