Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified
nascompares.com
nascompares.com
That's not a NAS anymore, that's a full server. I think of a NAS as "low-power computer with lots of storage attached", so not being able to upgrade the RAM on one isn't all that surprising.
With the price of drives right now I think I'll have to settle for a blueberry pie and a cowboy hat :\
Depending on the number of drives, you could instead probably afford some fancy cowboy footwear to go with your alternative purchases too.
Also depending on your preferred boot environment of course . . .
It's just 2 different usages of "NAS" for different contexts.
In a business/enterprise environment, "NAS" is a more constrained definition of a single-purpose rack that only does storage duties.
However, in a home environment, "NAS" is a fuzzier definition to also include running "apps" like Home Assistant, Plex/Jellyfish media, or webcam video analysis. Either in containers or vms. Both the vendors Synology/QNAP/UGREEN and the consumers use "NAS" in this looser definition. If you go out on Google search or Amazon to search for a "home server" to buy, you will get "NAS appliances" as the results. This happens because a NAS in a home usage has plenty of idle CPU leftover to run extra apps that's not strictly just storage. Buying a 2nd computer to run apps just to satisfy the NAS to remain as a "pure" NAS is a waste of money.
Similar situation to "routers". Business/enterprise routers are single purpose. But home routers from the ISP are fuzzier definitions. They also include a DHCP service, a firewall, and a Wi-Fi access point. Maybe the home versions are not "true pure routers" in the official OSI 7-layer sense. Ok, but home users still call them "routers".
I don't mind too much that a NAS runs file-sharing-oriented software as a bonus feature - if it can run Samba why can't it run Immich? But when you start using it for compute tasks it's not a storage box any more by definition. And that would be a more advanced extra feature whereas the basic functionality of a storage box is always storage.
You also can invert the relationship and run a NAS on a physical home server. My storage solution is a JBOD ("Just a bunch of disks") attached to a Proxmox virtualization host, where my home server runs as a VM inside Proxmox and then exposes selected directories via Samba to the home network. There's no second computer, I'm just running ~5 of them on one physical server. But by doing this, I get some isolation where if I've downloaded a questionable file, I can quarantine and inspect it (and roll back to a VM checkpoint if it compromises the machine) before I unleash it on the non-technical users of my home network.
I agree! Maybe my comment is misunderstood. I'm not saying "NAS" is the better term. Instead, I'm saying "NAS" is a common word that people have settled on in the home consumer market. The word "NAS" is literally imprinted on the outside of the box from Synology, QNAP, UGREEN etc even though they also run apps unrelated to pure NAS functionality.
>NAS brands show up on Google/Amazon searches because they're cross-advertising,
Right... but NAS still shows up in unpaid results even when using the specific term "home server". E.g. for Google query : https://www.google.com/search?q=%22home+server%22+for+jellyf...
... the #1 search result at the top is this unsponsored thread from reddit mentioning "NAS" repeatedly from various commenters : https://old.reddit.com/r/JellyfinCommunity/comments/1n48cc7/...
So... asking about running on jellyfin on a "home server", inevitably leads to responders talking about "NAS" ... but wait a sec... if it's a NAS running the Jellyfin music server, it's not really a NAS anymore and the "home server" should be perfectly fine terminology for that! But the replies keep using that word "NAS"! (See how people can keep going around in circles?) The original poster asking the question then adds a reply saying "From the others comments it also seems i should look into getting this NAS thing". Now he becomes one of them and starts using the word "NAS" on the way to having a "home server running jellyfin". The cycle is complete.
From that thread and observing how people naturally talk about this in the home consumer market, the word "NAS" just overwhelms "home server". Keeping the purity of the word "NAS" is not possible anymore.
Likewise, people use the word "phone" to describe the slab in their pocket even though it also has a camera, GPS navigator, calendar, etc. But we don't call it a more general term such as "multifunction pocket computer" or "PDA Personal Digital Assistant". Instead, everybody settled on the word "phone". Most people don't even use it as a phone but rather as a 2-way pager for text chats. Nevertheless, "phone" is the word we use even though it's inconsistent with all the features the device has and how we actually use it every day.
I think synedoche is relevant to how we use both "NAS" and "phone" in seemingly inconsistent ways : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche
We call it a NAS like we call the general purpose computer in our pockets a “phone”. Or the home server that connects to our ISP a “router”.
I’d be worried about starving my storage need for CPU (ZFS can use a good amount of CPU power) inadvertently.
Running some small services is nice, to avoid having more devices, but I think people want “server with storage” and not actually a NAS, which on the face of it is growing out from nothing more than an SMB share.
And, to be honest with you, I’d prefer phones that are battery powered get the 3nm process node and these kind of devices lagging on 7nm or whatever, since they have the capability to be powered from the wall, and you can have less consumptive cpus taking a larger spaces making a bit more heat/power per cycle: but since you need less you can get away with it.
Not everything can be 3nm or lower, the yields aren't good enough.
What I care more about is ECC.
Apple silicon with some other os would be an amazing low power nas.
If my microwave had programmable firmware I'd absolutely reprogram it, get rid of the annoying clock and make my own quick buttons for my most common meals...
What you quoted needs to be seen in the context of what author calls "increasing media demands". I.e. the author believes that while the way the system is configured might be OK today, it won't be OK in the future.
But, maybe if I try to salvage what you were trying to say: while failures are a fact of life, higher-quality products will try to minimize and mitigate more of them. Making more components replaceable, is the direction to improve resiliency, and therefore quality of the system. It could be impossible or highly impractical to make everything socket-mounted, but making more components socket-mounted is certainly a way to make a better product.
I disagree. And we can at least discuss whether a NAS that doesn't have ECC is that much of a NAS or not.
I'd take an old Xeon server with 64 GB of ECC memory, run its CPU in powersave mode, and slap TrueNAS (with ZFS) on it any day over buying a dedicated NAS.
YMMV but actual professional server gear, with ECC memory, is to me more of a NAS than a consumer NAS.
And nothing forces you to run a "full server": you can dedicate a real server to be only a NAS and slap the lowest consuming Xeon on it, which moreover you can run with a powersaving CPU governor.
Slap a 10 Gbit/s ethernet NIC in it and call it a day.
It shall be more reliable too.
You can of course cosplay with a consumer NAS but the real thing is better.
P.S: mine is a HP Z440 with a 14-cores Xeon (so a workstation, not a server: the advantage is that it's totally quiet)
Those Xeon E5's are 50w at idle, plus 10w for the 10Gb Ethernet, before you add any storage. A core 3 N300 is 1/10 of the power usage, for ~85% of the performance. Integrity at the filesystem level is required _anyway_ but if you want ECC ram, there's a bunch of AMD processors with similar power usage.
There’s a handful of these projects about. You’d need a moderate battery but it’s just about doable!
I just recommended an N5 Air [0] to a friend because it's got a powerful CPU, can expand to 96GB of RAM, has a great mix of NVME and HDD and has a PCI slot they can run an Intel A310 in for local transcode. It's the perfect Proxmox host to run everything they'd want to do including local services but also fault tolerant storage for a reasonable price.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetApp
When I think of NAS, I think of Network Appliance. Even in the mid-90s they were already well-known as the makers of the most formidable turnkey NAS that an enterprise could have. They are so awesome and specialized that I never even worked near one. Their systems were called "filers" and they have proprietary filesystems with proprietary kernels and CLI, that present with an NFS interface, among other things. The Filers are blazingly fast and ultra-high-capacity.
Home NAS machines have often been used as full servers and in the past allowed those upgrades. And it makes sense in a home to have one device that's flexible enough to fill multiple roles, be small, and quiet.
Also, the form factor!
Why complain about those, then?
Diy is still possible. Looks like nas is becoming more specialized.
And often not only the price is high but poor reliability.
It is amazing that no one spoke about security in any of the child comments of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131785
Your definition of fiddling is maybe wrong. Not everyone is Linus S or Jeff geerling to look for that exact DDR stick etc. Get a resonable laptop or mini PC with 2 x drives. Done. Even windows drive share.
A casual user would never buy a NAS at all, since most prefer the ease of something like iCloud or Google. If you buy a NAS you often have a specific reason to (too much data, needing to be able to reach a speed to work off of it, security...) and then the fiddeling becomes an advantage I feel. Yes it's a bit more effort, but you can get something that actually does what you want to instead of what the manufacturer thinks that you want it to do.
Hackers (whatever kind) are just one portion of the total populace. Others deserve genuinely good products, too. And maybe sometimes even a hacker wants to take a break. ;-)
I can fiddle perfectly well. I do it all day at work, with workstations, servers and HPC. I can already scratch that itch with much nicer than I will be ever able to buy myself. But I am not spending 1 hour more than I need to for my NAS at home, life is too short and I also like to have other hobbies. To the point that yes, I do spend a bit more for convenience and niceness.
> And maybe sometimes even a hacker wants to take a break. ;-)
Exactly.
My AI rig ... that is a project. (After a kernel update, one of my GPUs has disappeared. Fixing that will be a project for my next day off.) I don't want my NAS to ever become a weekend project.
Performance is great. I could do it because I was given those disks for free, with plenty of ours on each of them.
These days I managed to snag a deal on a Supermicro 846. I'm still settling into it, the main thing that concerns me is being able to suck enough air through the drive bays without making a lot of noise. My previous incarnation used some iStar toolless drive bays. I've learned to appreciate hot-swap bays, mainly for only having to do the cabling once.
Jank ass recycled pcs and expensive, overbuilt diy rigs simply don’t even belong in the same conversation.
You will probably rely on it for 10 years at least, so building your NAS means committing to maintaining it in the long term, you have to be sure this is something you will uphold.
Also while setting up your NAS initially is definitely doable, there are a trillion little things to get right and make sure won't bite you later on (scrubble, etc).
All these things compounds if the NAS is not just for you, but your wife, kids, family, etc. Now it becomes your responsibility that all these precious data and photos entrusted to you are 100% safe for the decades to come.
A NAS is not a backup? It's hot storage.
I have a NAS but I backup my photos on AWS in S3 Deep Glacier. It costs me less than $1 a month for 500GB of pictures. That's a backup.
If it is only place you store your data sure, you need another option to backup the NAS itself
I have a NAS made from a 15-year-old computer, with standard parts. It can saturate a gigabit link over WireGuard, so it's good enough for my needs. I installed the latest Linux kernel on it the other day. And it doesn't have random unknown stuff calling home. Since it runs ZFS and scrubs regularly, I'm quite confident the data on it is still in good shape.
The only really functional OSS NAS exception for small offices is the CephFS builds from https://www.45drives.com , and that is because of included support services. =3
https://github.com/rclone/rclone
From a maintenance perspective, one must not assume a NAS is a backup, but rather a high-bandwidth local/VPN file share.
* maids unplug equipment to vacuum offices (yes, this does really happen.)
* drives fail eventually, bit-rot is a thing, and filesystems evolve over time
* hardware specific features will always become a problem eventually. No one will check a degraded RAID/ZFS setup without service telemetry.
Practical options:
* sshfs + JBOD mount is fine for most home win11/bsd/linux/macOS/iOS/android users, as simple things have less failure modes and less time-cost to repair.
* fault tolerant systems like CephFS are usually too complex for home users. However, https://www.45drives.com offers a support option for small offices.
* ZFS has a lot of tradeoffs, and most people don't use the better key features (auto-snap-shotting and docker/VM deduplication.) In some cases even F2FS will also work fine, and probably last a bit longer with consumer flash drives.
* I agree the IT support issue with distros like TrueNAS or openmediavault becomes a popularity contest over what features are supported long-term.
It is often better to use a generic OpenBSD or Debian OS installation, and run the rclone network share abstractions on PC/Mac clients. Android and iPhone both have sftp clients for auto media backups over router VPN as well..
Lightning always wins every argument, an offsite VPN to remote file-backup is usually wise. =3
It's similar to the days when buying a PC would involve either finding a friend who could read the specs from the computer shop, make a list and assemble the PC once all the components are bought, or you'd buy a build from the shop (with some extra markup for the service). And today most PC users have moved on to laptops if not just even phones.
Most people will use what's commercially available. Today, most NAS users won't have an old PC case with HDD mounts laying around. They will have to buy something, and that something will likely be a pre-built NAS, the kind this article is written about. And similar to how laptops are a form of enshitification of desktops, these NAS boxes are too. Removing modularity drives the price down, but also doesn't allow the users the ability to repair and to study the product they own.
People aren't "crazy" about buying pre-built NAS boxes. It's what there is, they buy what's available.
The problem is the "old pc" is typically a desktop-class cpu which is very power hungry. (~100 watts). And to make things worse, the older cpu has slower performance that doesn't justify the extra watts it consumes.
For 17+ years, I used a 2008 era Intel DX58SO motherboard + Core i7 920 in a full size Silverstone tower case as my NAS. It originally started with 1.5 TB drives and I just kept upgrading the drives all the way up to 16 TB. It worked ok and was reliable so I was never interested in turnkey NAS appliance like Synology, etc. I also wanted to install my own os, plus recycle/reuse/repurpose philosophy, and not be shackled by a proprietary NAS ... yada yada yada. The big problem with re-using my old PC is that at idle, it consumed 125 watts.
Electricity isn't 11 cents per kWh like it was 17 years ago. It's now 21c/kWh -- and will keep going up because of AI, oil prices, etc.
Last month, I did a lot of research to reduce the power usage and ended up buying a UGREEN DXP4800 Pro NAS appliance. UGREEN lets you install your own os and it uses a laptop-class cpu (much better performance specs than Synology) which is much more power efficient. At idle, it consumes just 25 watts. Also, the Intel i3-1315U in the UGREEN has a Geekbench score of 2124 which beats the i7 920 of 450. So 4x the performance while using 1/5th the power usage!
I briefly considered "upgrading" my DX58SO/i7-920 to another old pc (2014 era) X99/i7-5820K. That's slightly more power efficient of ~80 watts idle. However, running ffmpeg to convert videos makes it jump to ~180w! The UGREEN can do the same ffmpeg conversion with better performance and yet it only increases to ~45 watts.
Another unexpected bonus of lower power usage is that my server room temperature is noticeably less warm, and the lower power UGREEN gets 3x the runtime on the APC battery backup when there's a power outage. The UGREEN did cost $700 but the savings on the electricity bill will recover that in about 4 years.
I also like the UGREEN toolless hard drive sleds. The old Silverstone tower hd sleds required screws. I also like the smaller footprint. The NAS appliance was a total quality-of-life improvement.
The only thing I "lost" from the old tower setup was the CD/DVD drive bay. But I don't rip discs anymore so I that doesn't matter. If I really really wanted to, I can hook up a DVD drive to the UGREEN via a SATA-to-USB adapter but I hope to never buy physical media again so I don't expect that will happen.
There's an allure to re-using a "free" old PC as a NAS and there's also the pride of a DIY storage solution. However, that mindset also makes one overlook the negatives of that setup. Sometimes, "free" items actually cost more money.
I have Ugreen DXP4800 plus NAS with 10-core i5-1235u and 32GB RAM, 10GBit LAN for price of what people pay for Synology with 4-core low power Ryzen 1500 and 8GB RAM and 2,5GBit LAN.
And if I wanted to save money, I would buy some older workstation for pennies with hell lot of GB ECC's, lots of caddy's add extenion cards for NVMe.
Just yesterday I heard about a friend-of-a-friend type situation where the sysadmin husband was in hospice, and the wife was struggling to figure out how to operate the NAS to recover family photos, etc.
I think consumer NAS manufacturers could add a "foolproof backup connection method," such as a USB port in USB device mode, so the NAS could be easily connected to a laptop by someone with little computer knowledge, in read-only mode.
That said, my home NAS is "the littlest server": an aging ProLiant DL380 Gen8 MicroServer. It's behind a double conversion UPS. SAS card + drives, Proxmox running virtualized FreeNAS, etc. Typical overdone geek build. I have not seen a finer NAS platform for the precocious home admin. I wish there were newer versions which kept the enterprise style "lights out management," and added m.2 and such, but I think HP Enterprise as a company is not interested in the homelab use case.
It should have been apparent to anyone by that time that "someone malicious physically standing next to the box" is an order of magnitude rarer security risk than "someone connecting from a network" and aligned UX to that.
There is no mention of the usual enshittyfication, instead their complaint is that things look generic and that is the last of the list. I would say this is a feature.
The points about locking and dumbing down products are well researched, true and worrisome.
I’ve bought a NAS after watching NASCompares a few years ago, and also an ethernet adapter. His videos are nice. Talking about enshittyfication on an enshittyfied site misses the mark a little bit. “Legitimate interest”… lol.
Yeah, that kinda dark pattern / malicious compliance junk ought to be straight up illegal. At least on par with "contempt of court" type situations. Sure, they may (just barely) comply with the absolute letter of the law, but the spirit of the law is surely being very much abused and deeply disrespected there.
It is illegal.
> To comply with the regulations governing cookies under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive you must:
> [...]
> - Allow users to access your service even if they refuse to allow the use of certain cookies
> - Make it as easy for users to withdraw their consent as it was for them to give their consent in the first place.
7 clicks is not as easy as one "accept all", violating the last point. Not allowing you to dismiss the banner and access the site violates the other point.
The real problem is enforcement, unfortunately.
It is not malicious compliance
It is not complying to the law
Law clearly states how the reject path should look and they are NOT in compliance, just nobody sued them yet
I also use, 'Cookie Auto-Delete', which deletes a sites cookies as soon as I close the tab, unless I specify to keep them, which I do on sites I want to remain logged into.
It surprises me people put up with these annoyances, or ads either.
Using uBlock Origin with cookie consent modal filters is way better (but causes breakage at times).
Truth to be told, a NAS is the perfect place to have your home server. You can have both your applications and data on the same device and avoid having to build a lab just to have nextcloud or some other utility self hosted. However, to achieve this, the OS must become more similar to a normal linux distro, for better or for worse
Reading the article, I don't regret it. Part of what puts me off the regular NAS market is price, but also things like non redundant boot options, ambiguity about whether or not I can install my own OS, and the lack of slots. The NAS form factor itself is off-putting because if you're buying something that isn't Synology or whatever, the RAM tax is still there.
Maybe I'm a cheapskate who will have slightly higher opex, but old hardware does seem to be pretty much as good as new hardware, to me.
In the end I just cleaned out all my shit and got rid of it. Less is more.
Soldered RAM and novel format hardware is a pain point. Macbook storage upgrade needs special custom hardware. Synology still doesn't allow third party HDDs in their extension units. NAS devices are truly a fantastic category on its own. My data remains local, while also allowing me to use it as a server for my workloads.
They do: https://serverpartdeals.com/
Haven’t used them myself, but afair Wendel (Level1Techs) mentioned them at some point.
Caveat emptor, of course.
The only challenge would be finding a very good cable that stays solidly.
I’ve had a HP N40L for 15 years and every time I see the current offerings I hope I don’t have to look for hardware soon; it’s been such a great homelab server. After FreeNAS > TrueNAS Core, I now roll my own FreeBSD. It felt like a great leap into the deep end going from GUI to CLI, but I haven’t once looked back.
I've run two NAS appliances for 15+ years now, and never had to worry about any of this, because I just run good old Community Linux or BSD on it.
I can plug whatever PCIe card I want, as much storage as I want and from whom I want.
I just looked and the hard drives I've bought before are currently >3x the price I last paid. I know I'm not telling anyone anything new but I'm just praying my existing drives hold out since replacing them (even 1) if they fail will cost a small fortune.
A client had a NAS for their SaaS startup. Disks were having issues. The NAS was a prosumer product that was connected via USB. Had some SATA to SATA cable shipped by Amazon to the garage/colocation facility which basically meant removing the NAS and connecting the disks straight to the motherboard.
Issue solved.
It seems like one of those tarpit product categories that you are just better off by skipping completely, like ORMs, MCPs or reverse proxy HTTP servers.
I don't understand why people would go with an actual pre-built NAS from a manufacturer over my approach. It's always a complete rip-off.
EDIT: OK I see he doesn't like the onboard eMMC - fair enough.
I paid $280 for a DXP 2800, and was fortunate enough to get drives before the recent price increases. But I've only got 8GB and missed my window for an inexpensive jump to 16GB. Still it isn't having performance issues for my needs.
Serves as NAS, media server (Jellyfin), photo server (Immich). I've also dabbled with some web serving via pre-made docker images but haven't taken it very far.
(Oddly, my store still has exactly one in stock for ~$240 on clearance which is really funny seeing the very current price hike at $439 "MSRP" now. That is painful. Of course, the $279 drive I bought in store is now $399, so that also sucks.)
I killed the onboard eMMC (it's just a BIOS setting - turn the eMMC off at the same time you disable the OS watchdog), slapped an NVMe inside the slot, and put my 10TB rust spinner in the bay and threw TrueNAS on the flash and it's happy as all can be.
ANNOYINGLY they now seem to stock an ARM-based UGreen for around $200 as the new 'Walmart' unit and that's kinda a bit more limited in what you can do.
If the storage doesn’t need to be fast a newer Pi can do it with USB-C drives.
An old Intel Mac mini from eBay makes a good home file server too and is compatible with everything. Get a thunderbolt drive bay.
I still think Apple should have bring their AirPort Express and Time Capsule back. Instead they wanted everyone to be on their iCloud subscription.
But for the love of God, please fix Time Machine.
FDE with Secure Boot on Linux is a minefield.
ZFS doesn't do tiering.
Sadly on Windows tiering is also expensive (requires Server editions).
how is this a negative? I would say, please do more like ugreen and support alternative OS, provide drivers and integrations.
eMMC bad because un-upgradeable and/or repairable. m.2 bad because if it wasn't there a user could put a big storage device there.
I'm not even sure what the author wants here?
Last year they tried restricting the OS from creating new volumes unless all drives in it were Synology branded. People tore them a new asshole in the press and they backed away from that.
Now their newest DSM 7.4 release features a new smart storage system with postprocessing deduplication and compression. I tried to enable that on my own volume for testing, but nope: it only works on “pure Synology” volumes.
Fuck that. Synology, get this out of your damn heads. I will never, never buy your stupid, overpriced drives. It won’t happen. Never. And on top of the ludicrous price premium, if one breaks, how do I can get a replacement urgently? If my IronWolf blows up, I can drive over to Central Computer and come home with another just like it. Amazon has few Synology drives in stock and none of them are large. When I have a dead drive, the last thing I’m gonna want to do is go on an urgent quest for a replacement unicorn.
I’m done with ‘em. It’s clear they’re fixated on this stupid idea and aren’t going to give it up. Well, good luck with that and your remaining customer base, which no longer includes me.
unsure about this 'smart storage' as my Syno is too old anyway :)
While I do prefer the DIY route, I'd struggle to call that "enshitified". Vensors consolidated around solutions because they work reliably, without reinventing the wheel. I'd much rather a NAS be a lightweight wrapper around a proven and easily maintained base than try to over extend themselves and jerry-rig some abomination.
And for customers who rely on them it means they can shift brands and still feel basically just at home.
I've got 16tb drives (in a usb-c DAS, not NAS), and at 2-3 the price that I bought them for I don't plan to replace them when they go.
The data will just be lost, like tears in rain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage#Descr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Network-attached_...
But people justifying much of this segmentation?
Come ON, any NAS is just a server. What are people DOING here?
I don't think NAS v. Server or whatever this whole thread is about is -- or more importantly, should be.
(In other words, the concrete position should be e.g. -- soldering RAM is just BAD actually. It's dumb and terrible and they just shouldn't do it ever.)
These days I just store my files in S3. Whether or not this actually costs me more money becomes a very irrelevant shade of grey once I factor in the value of my time and sanity. I prefer having the capability to store and retrieve large files, not spending time maintaining this capability. This is also my "off-site" backup. I am paying for my operational NAS and its backup effectively at the same time. No one doing DIY is remotely close to 99.999999999% durability, even with all the kings horses and men put together.
I often see this urgency with total control pushing tech people into the very systems of oppression they seek to avoid. Putting your bits in some blob storage provider like AWS is not "losing the game" unless you frame it that way in your head. You can frame it as "getting one over on the bad guys" if you are a little bit clever with how you approach the problem. You can compel Amazon host any kind of bits with a sprinkle of AES256 on the client. I've been a customer with them for over 15 years and not once have they rug pulled me. I've never seen a NAS-style solution survive that long without intervention.
S3 takes replication seriously to a professional level, when you upload a file to S3 the chance of s3 losing it is capped by the chance of a civilization killing asteroid hitting the earth.
What happens if your drive dies just as you're uploading the file to S3? Why are we comparing the durability of S3 to the reliability of my Internet connection, instead of to the durability of rsync.net?
> I've been a customer with them for over 15 years and not once have they rug pulled me.
I actually tend to agree with the thrust of your argument, but how is your view of getting your account banned different than others' view of managing a NAS?
A power surge protector?
I’ve seen way too many RAM slots go bad.
Smart people always get the highest configuration in computers, unless they know they’ll never need some of the resources and can tolerate a lower option.
Smart rich people, maybe. Have you got the money for extra RAM right now?
I'd much rather replace a bad stick than a whole motherboard/device.
So if I'm buying a server and it's available with anything between 8GB and 4TB of RAM (the price difference being ~$70,000), and my current use only requires 8GB, how much should I get? There is a 50% chance the project fails and I never need more than 8GB and a 50% chance it succeeds and then I'll need 64GB or 512GB or 4TB depending on how well it goes.