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.
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".
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
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.
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”.
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 . . .
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.
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...
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.
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.
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!