No fiddling is definitely not a primary point. If one has both valuable or large amounts of data fiddling is inevitable. Nothing I have seen in retail markets is at a level of chromecast or phone setup or TV setup.

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

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lm2s 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Of course no fiddling is a primary point. That’s probably _the main point_. Sure you need _some_ configuration/setup, but it’s in a completely different ballpark to a custom built solution.

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whyagaindavid 4 hours ago | parent [-]

which brand? Anytime you have data locally it is lot of work. There is a reason people go to Google drive or even proton drive etc for that reason. If you can do that initial setup then DIY is not worse. Yes, all these plug-n-play give a false sense of security. One of the RAID drives is failing - no one knows.

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.

	▲	conorcleary 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		storage of data long-term of course to many segments of a market needs to be seamless and safe feeling, comforting even. To slap a brand on the side of a NAS that is complex and causes grandma to lose the entire family photo history that you scanned for a few summers after your uncle did research for decades - well, that's not great for repeat sales, right?
	▲	anonreplier 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Why are you comparing a laptop to a NAS?

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alpaca9 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Believe me, you don't want a NAS at a chromecast level. Chromecasts are designed to be user friendly and hide a lot of settings. That wouldn't be a problem if the things worked at least. I can't even count how many times I've had to reset a chromecast because something broke and wasn't fixable.

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.