I'm looking for a NAS for a very long time (budget, size, network, etc.), but when I was ready to pull the trigger on a Synology, they did this, and I dodged a bullet.

Long story short, I'll be buying an ASUSTOR AS6804T, and if I don't like the software, I'll just install TrueNAS on it. It's not only officially supported, they have a full length video showing the process. They don't provide tech support, but eh.

Icing on the cake? The eMMC storing the original firmware sits on its own USB port, so you disable that port, and both disable and protect the firmware from being overwritten.

If you want to return to original firmware, enable the port, remove the TrueNAS SSD, and viola!

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omgmajk 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

About a year ago I did the opposite, I bought an ASUSTOR and noticed the software was terrible, didn't want to fiddle too much with it because it was within return to store range still. Returned it and got a Synology. Then they released their updated plans a while later.

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lmm 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Asustor were pretty useless when mine stopped working, and had a pretty bad ransomware incident where they did a lot of blaming users for their own buggy software. I won't be buying from them again.

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re 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I looked up the ransomware attack out of curiosity: https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/asusto...

It looks like Deadbolt also hit QNAP and Terramaster.

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bayindirh 5 days ago | parent [-]

Also, it looks like only units which are accessible from the internet are hit, but isolated units did not get hit.

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lmm 5 days ago | parent [-]

> only units which are accessible from the internet

Sort of. Accessible via Asustor's own software which they'd been promoting to users, which I'm pretty sure had some kind of hole punching / bridge node setup so that you could use it even if you were blocking all inbound connections to your NAS. Obviously if you completely disconnect it from the internet in both directions then you're safe (but also can't get updates etc.)

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bayindirh 5 days ago | parent [-]

I plan to keep mine in an egress only state behind NAT (It can connect somewhere, but it's not reachable). Maybe, maybe I'll include it in my VPN setup.

	▲	lmm 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, that was the state mine was in, it didn't save me.

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bayindirh 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I can just install TrueNAS and be happy, though. I'm not afraid of configuring things.

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ramon156 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Does just getting an intel NUQ not suffice? i bought one for 180 and it works great. runnint ~16 apps + an MC server and no issues

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dvdkon 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's not really comparable hardware. The AS6804T has four 3.5" HDD bays, Synology hardware generally offers two to eight bays. They're NASes, the NUC is just a mini computer with little to no built-in storage capacity. It's not about the apps here.

	▲	bayindirh 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Plus, 4 SSD slots and 16GB ECC RAM which is upgradeable to 64GB. That thing is a sleeper.

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bayindirh 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I already have an infrastructure like that. Mine is running Debian Stable, a couple of containers for background jobs and a couple of daemons.

However, I need to backup a lot of things, and ensure that they don't bitrot. A decade old photography archive, meticulously ripped CD libraries, a full cloud storage backup, etc. etc. Plus I don't want to dig disks to get a single file which I don't want to put on somebody else's computer (i.e. cloud storage).

This needs a two tiered solution. Flash based hot-data area for the running daemons and a spinning array for backups. Both RAID (to be able to scrub and repair bitrot).

The problem is, I'm a sysadmin. I see & use big storage systems and know what they are capable of. I want the personally useful subset of this at home. Plus I want to make it accessible to other people at home, so their files will be safe, too.

This means at least TrueNAS and 4-6 disks to begin with.