this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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I'd DIY it (maybe with FreeNAS, about which I know nothing) instead of buying a proprietary NAS in a box. What's the point of self-hosting if you're going to be at the mercy of someone else's software anyway? If you're DIY'ing, there are 3.5" drive enclosures with soundproofing stuff in them that should keep the drive pretty quiet. Or if you can afford enough SSD's for your storage requirements, then use those.
I dunno about recommending FreeNAS (Known as truenas now). It is basically an appliance OS, and unless you are using enterprise level hardware, they want nothing to do with you.
I'm currently using it, but it was a very unpleasant experience setting it up.
What was unpleasant for you? TrueNAS just works for me and was no hassle at all to setup on my DIY N100 NAS.
Not OP, but at least for me when I tried it:
There was no way to use or even just mount and migrate my existing storage (btrfs+LVM). LVM wasn't even installed, and when I tried to install it, I got an error saying that
aptwas disabled on the system, which means I was basically locked out of doing anything more than what they allow you to do on your own hardware.It seems like it's technically open source, but having all the vendor lock-in features and lack of control of a proprietary solution
The only use case seems for it to be used as a black box appliance:
I knew it is supposed to be only an appliance, but with how much people recommended it, I didn't thing it would be this closed of a system; I think I've read about people doing more things with even just their Synology hardware
Annoyingly, disk discovery. It refused to use my disks, claiming they didn't have serial numbers. I could see the serial numbers in the frontend and the console, but their middleware just hated them.
I am using a USB multi-disk drive thing, which didn't work properly on an old kernel, but it should have been fine with the new kernel.
I reported the bug, which didn't really get addressed, and then had to build my array using the command line tools (which aren't documented).
Set it up on my uGreen DXP4800+
The most unpleasant thing was to configure the LED health indicator and learning how it works.