The hardware is still fine. You can put Debian on it!
There is a very active forum of people replacing the WD firmware with Debian on various models (EX2 Ultra, EX2100, EX4100): https://forum.doozan.com/list.php?2
But if the software is with built-in backdoor there is no reason to trust the hardware.
If you're trying to provide equivalent functionality, you can keep the same equivalent specs (or more likely, get a spec upgrade anyway) and deliver the same quality end result (IE, no ECC RAM) at a lower cost. You're unlikely to suffer a performance or integrity penalty compared to the equivalent off-the-shelf NAS solution.
If you want to substantially improve on the off-the-shelf NAS solution, ECC RAM is recommended, and will at that point, probably become more expensive.
Then again, if you want 10+ drives, you'll probably still be cheaper doing it yourself.
The big death blow however is the inability to grow a vdev which means you have to pay the for redundancy each time you upgrade. Which isn't cost effective, so the alternative is to buy all drives up front which robs you of taking advantage of falling prices (as you probably don't need all that space on day one but gradually increase the storage used). This forces you to pick smaller drives that are more cost effective today (compared to buying a few larger drives that will become cheaper in the future), which means that you will have to replace the drives sooner when you run out of room in your chassi (or get tired of noise / power consumption).
I love freenas, in my opinion it is the best solution for the home NAS. I use it myself, but I do consider it to be quite costly (whether it is worth it is up to you). The end results all things considering is easily more than double that of a COTS solution that you can easily grow or a more regular linux+mdadm setup. And you also need to buy more of that up front rather than spreading it out over the years.
But it does depend on what your needs are and how much data you use.
And if we want to talk optimized setups it really isn't recommended to add new vdevs to a already populated pool since the usage will be quite unbalanced and affect performance as well.
Most other mainstream filesystems have tools to restore and attempt at repair the filesystem meaning that you can often restore the data.
ZFS also utilizes the memory more which means that it is more likely to be affected by memory issues.
Is it likely? No. But since us mortals seldom have tape backups and usually can't afford to backup everything on their NAS I'd say that ECC is recommended for ZFS, more so than most other filesystems. Just as a consequence of how it is used and the lack of recovery tools, not because of the filesystem itself.
Sure, at home I have a real server with ECC RAM, running on a Solaris derivate with additional VMs... but hey...! ;-)
They also have some very odd practices, like hard-coding specific users and the shell to be used inside OpenSSH binary [2]. This was 2012; haven't checked if the code improved since then.
[1] https://wrgms.com/synologys-secret-telnet-password/
[2] https://serverfault.com/questions/458553/cant-log-in-via-ssh...
Honestly, the older I get, the more sick of IT I become, but what can we do about this?
Im in the market for a NAS right now, so this is perfect timing. I’m more willing to trust FreeNAS than MyCloud but as soon as I write that, I remember lots of Open Source is crap too.
https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-mini/
You get FreeNas on good hardware by people who know what they are doing. I have been running this for years and I have no complaints exept that the 8 slot variant did not exists when I bought mine.
Edit: It seems they don't sell to the UK :(
It is still way better then the competition.
If RISC-V is fast enough to power a NAS and open source SATA controllers exist, I would absolutely prefer a setup involving that.
If I'm not going to get that... I'd probably prefer a setup from Synology. They'll do a good enough job, probably better than I could, even if the price is a premium.
https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-mini/
I have won and its pretty awesome, running for years, have replaced the disks multible times by now.
Its very upgradable as well, you can put in more ram, caches and so on.
Open Hardware is pretty much a no-go at the moment, but iXSystems does support a lot of Open Source.
I would recommend this setup above any of these Synology things, when I compare my problems with my friends who have Synology, I usually come out pretty happy with my choices.
I'm sure it's more stable now than it was when I used it last, but it's frustrating when people say "no, this time it's really stable!" and then you lose data due to a bug. This same thing has never happened to me with ZFS on Linux, which is a shame because the licensing issues make it painful for me to use. I like up to date kernels.
I feel like btrfs should be phased out. It was clearly developed in a fashion that did nothing to prevent preventable bugs. This may be the same frustration that's leading RedHat to work on their own competing filesystem...