> install using the file system you fancy, setup the raid you want, install samba and nfs, eventually avahi and encryption and that’s pretty much it.
It isn’t though.
I got that far and I wasn’t happy. There’s a lot of extra stuff you have to think about when you want a system to run unattended, vs something that’s a workstation.
First thing I noticed was the noise and the heat. Had to install a daemon to power down the hard disks when not in use. Then when I wanted RAID I had to go spend half a day learning to do that. Then there was software updates. So on and so forth.
I also had some lingering concerns about power consumption which meant I was going to have to get out some power monitors and read some stuff about Linux power tuning.
After a while the sense of “all in one” like packages TrueNAS and unraid started to make sense.
I was all set for unraid but luckily I came into a bit of extra money and I was able to buy some of my life back with a simple box with all of this designed and configured by people who know what they are doing.
Now all I need to do is manage storage and services which is all I should have to do with a NAS.
All this stuff is interesting to learn but there’s only so many hours in the day.
By all means if you want a hobby project or you’re not concerned with non functional aspects like reliability, power consumption and security and maintenance or if you’re very poor then building your own NAS makes sense.
> Had to install a daemon to power down the hard disks when not in use
It depends on the drives you buy, of course, but unnecessary spin-up/spin-down cycles will wear out drives faster. Many NAS drives will keep running intentionally for this reason. If the drives didn't spin down by themselves, it's possible they weren't designed to start/stop that often.
My personal NAS solution is a combination of Debian (for stability and unattended updates) with a motherboard that's in low-power mode, with ZFS + the usual software for accessing the NAS installed. I could write a script that reboots the system based on /var/run/reboot-required but a monthly scheduled reboot works fine too.
In my experience, this setup rarely requires any maintenance. It's quite boring for a homelab project. Once every few years I need to upgrade to a newer version of Debian (last time I went from 10 to 11 to 12 in one go) but even that isn't much of a spectacle if you don't mess with non-Debian package repositories.
I have basically the same setup using Arch, because I don't trust distributions that patch a lot, and btrfs, because I use disks of mismatched sizes.
I used to change the frequency governor for my cpu on my previous NAS but the default Linux setup (schedutil) is now perfectly adequate. Same with disk power, default is fine.
The whole thing just shugs along happily with basically no effort on my side apart from the occasional upgrade requiring manual intervention.
It certainly didn't require anything which I would consider non sense - and I have seen plenty of things I would call that in the past, looking at you OpenLDAP and PAM. Sure, you need to have a vague idea of what RAID is but then again building a NAS and expecting to need zero knowledge of storage seems extremely ambitious to me. Then again, I realise that what I consider basic knowledge taken for granted might not seem to be so basic someone else point of view.
I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree. I wouldn't buy these NAS products as they are specifically because I do care about these things, and they do not meet the standards I expect.
Guess it’s just a matter of how much you value your time for other matters. I like “the idea” of tinkering but I certainly don’t like the reality of having to do ongoing maintenance and improvements beyond the initial implementation. Sounds too much like work.