Bought a QNAP TS-859Pro+ in around 2009. Still using it to this day. It has an Atom CPU and 2GB RAM. Started out with 8x 3TB HDDs, now has 6x14TB and 2x4TB. Always could sustain 125MB/s which is as fast as gigabit ethernet can manage. Great unit, only just out of free vendor patch support after 10 years. Never missed a beat. Far better than some mongrel PC based build.

For $400 + Drives you can build your own which runs @ 35W, be more reliable, faster, non proprietary, easier to fix, and do more. Not everybody has the time or skill though.

One of the reasons I went into building my own server. It runs a NAS and a lot of more, because I found the NASes available on the market were extremely expensive with very cheap hardware. I ended up spending a bit more but now have an awesome rig.

About the power consumption: We could make way more efficient CPUs these days. So this argument is totally invalid. A modern CPU with the same performance would just use a fraction of the power. About the money: Companies like Synology who buy these CPUs, are buying them is such a large stack, that they pay way less then the usual market. The difference between a old and new CPU is just a few euros at best. About the performance: Yes, NAS systems don't need that much. But we could also build low end CPUs these days which would even bring more to the power consumption and money part. About the heat: Today's low end CPUs do disappear way less heat compared to the old ones while at the same time offer bigger performance and less power consumption. So sorry to say this, but except for making a bigger profit, it makes no sense to use these old CPUs. Companies like Synology are big enough to request optimized CPUs for their systems which would be way way better. They just use leftover stocks to increase the profit. All the arguments in the video just sound like a fanboy defending the NAS companies.

My smartphone probably have more powerful CPU and energy efficient than those NAS.

A lot of the responses below of "build it yourself" miss the reason we buy these things. They're an off the shelf device that just works. Convenience is hecking important. I'm an ex sysAdmin, and don't care to spend countless hours of my life researching parts, building a device and then troubleshooting it during every OS update. Vendor devices have that design and testing integrated with them. I don't need nor want to allocate my precious brain-resources to "yet another 'ing Linux box that demands maintenance". I have two NASes that are 5+ years old and still going strong. I also have a custom rackmount jobbie that's a high powered widget. One requires brain to manage, the others do not. Purchase (or obtain) the product that matches your needs. Don't be a Linux weeny and diss others for making choices that differ from yours.

Would love to see dedicated NAS vs FreeNAS pro's and cons of each.

The remaining question: With all this characteristics, why not use portable (Note/Laptop/Tablet, even middle Smartphones) CPUs? The only answer should be the price. All the others specs can be done with this class of CPUs.

I agree with you re the power, heat and utilization issues. But some of the prices being asked despite this still takes the cake. You skirted it re price impacts but seemed to avoid the main reason behind it: "Profit Margin". It's a bit of a cop out not to address this. It's a perfectly legitimate and reasonable point. Companies (especially Synology) have been deliberately pricing themselves into higher tier of price points in the market whilst other competition such as QNAP or Asustor have equivalent products but with much higher specs and superior build quality. Having taken apart multiple NAS's, its very obvious that companies such as Synology are ripping their customers off (even completely ignoring the CPU) with the materials being used (a lot of plastic and thin metal) vs other competitors that use a lot more (thicker) metal in their construction. This and the CPU's selected for equivalent models amongst various NAS vendors make it extremely obvious that the profit margin on e.g. Synology models is far greater than the on QNAP or Asustor. So whilst some companies are still able to provide products at reasonable price points with higher end CPU's and better build quality, but for some reason other companies cannot? No. That just doesn't add up. And the missing variable that accounts for this discrepancy is profit margin. If you want a perfect example of a cheaper, more highly specced NAS, made of higher quality materials, yet is CHEAPER than the equivalent Synology, take a look at the Asustor NIMBUSTOR 4 (AS5304T) vs the Synology DS920+. It is atrocious the difference in hardware between those 2 NAS's (not just the CPU). I mean for pete's sake. How the hell did Synology release the 920+ with a 1GbE port on it and expect money for it whilst keeping a straight face in public? That's just taking the piss.

By the way, a Domestic NAS does have use cases where a GPU is welcome, for example when the NAS itself is responsible for video/audio transcoding like for example when working with solutions like PLEX (Though I don't use PLEX and rather have "special" destination folders that when a video goes there it will be automatically transcoded to a specific target resolution/quality/codec and moved to it's final location)

2:32 Shoutouts to the person using an i9-11900 in their NAS. Glad someone found a use for it!

I considered buying a synology but I wanted to use Plex and virtual machines, however there is no way it could handle it. So I built my own with an i5 using xpenolpgy. Works really well.

Just get an old i3 or i5 laptop and run free nas or other raid software. Cheaper and power efficient. Saves also from adding to the landfill by giving a new purpose for older equipment. Nice video but you sound like a lobbyist for nas manufactures.

I have a bit of an obsession with NAS devices so I've got quite a few spread around the home, including from some really old ones (anyone remember YellowMachine?) to some little dongle ones made by Addonics to a 24TB Exxablox. Something to note about "low-power" CPUs is that doesn't mean low performance. Some ARM-based ones from Realtek and Marvell can do circles around an Intel i7 in tasks heavily needed by a NAS, without even showing much of a blip on power usage. It's because these processors sometimes have dedicated co-processing units that can do packet processing/parsing, encryption/decryption and even GZIP compression/decompression (Marvel's Octeon) at potentially gigabytes or tens of gigabytes per second.

I agree with most of "Hans" Comments.There's far more efficiency with an intel based CPU in the long run in particular if you are using your NAS for video streaming with for example plex. Most low end CPU's either do not have on board graphics or they are of not use for streaming HD or 4K video, and yet they are dumped into a NAS and then sold as a High definition or even 4K capable steaming NAS, when in fact they are incapable of streaming these video formats or process transcoding when required. I think it's high time NAS manufacturers staring installing more powerful CPU's into there products. Most home users are wanting the NAS for streaming, and the vast majority are not up to the task.

I agree BUT when I drop hundreds of photos into a folder...my DS214+ chugs away and I can see that it sometimes takes several hours...sometimes days to process the photos. It would be nice to have an efficent ARM that is closer to an M1 chip.

I still prefer to make my own custom NAS by buying a RACK enclosure and using slightly older hardware, like for example 2nd hand enterprise SAS Controllers with cache on them (good price and they should last quite long in a non-demanding environment like domestic or small business usage, the HDDs and SSDs themselves are more important reliability wise that should be the budget allocation priority, storage quality and performance)

What's missing is that a lot of us just don't even keep up with the various CPU's these days so we don't realize that they are lower end models by some measures. It would be nice just to start with a spectrum of bad to good and where they all fit.

I still feel ripped off by the price of my Synology NAS, but it does help ease the pain a little.

I'm more of a geek so the flexibility to run my own NAS OS, ability to expand space for storage just by changing case or adding 10Gb/s Ethernet by dropping expansion card is much more appealing. Question is does i3, Pentium, Celeron capable to run SSD nas? (Yes I need SSD)

It is ridiculous that QNAP provides an HDMI port so you can watch your pics and videos directly on your TV ... but then uses CPU/GPU's in their NAS units that, until very recently perhaps, not been able to natively play higher bandwidth videos like GoPro files. Or maybe my TS - 251+ NAS use is a corner case and there are very few people who buy an NAS to store/preserve their years of family pics and videos??

I find that even in the enterprise grade stuff that sells for 2-5x the price the NAS companies still use older less efficient CPUs and update specs rarely. A lot of kit is still using 8th gen Intel from 2017 the prices are the same as when the products were released years ago and it’s not like these are expensive CPU’s you’re talking $250 on a $3000 NAS

Choice would be nice as the form and fit of a NAS enclosure is very friendly for upkeep

I can answer this with one word…..profits. Crap cpus are cheap, and if you want something better you pay a lot more. Hell qnap builds expensive boxes using junk first gen ryzen embedded apus. For what they charge for those I can build a 3rd gen 8 core ryzen and tweak power consumption.

Not looking for highend cpus but why not low end Core-i chips like 3 or 5 series?

Speed, Effeciency, low power draw… Time to include Apple’s SOC ? Thanks for your vids!

Very interesting video. I guess that I can reluctantly appreciate the explanation and the logic. I still happen to believe that most of these NASs are overpriced.

For the same reason I don't have jet engine on my moped.

Great video; thank you!

Thank you for sharing!

1. The CPUs selected here are not selected because they could last longer or for their efficiency. A modern high spec CPU can throttle to equally low consumption at idle running so that power consumption no longer is the driving force and with the upcoming generations with their big.little design, just like ARM socs on mobile devices have had for years, the point disappears completely. And don't forget, the faster speeds allow them to complete CPU intensive tasks faster. While they might require more power during that time, the overall power consumption might actually be lower. The CPUs are often Celerons or Atoms, CPUs designed for the low end market where cost matters more than functionality or longevity. 2. I really had to laugh at this point. Not sure what the margin is that manufacturers like Synology or QNAP have on their NAS devices, but it is not going to be small. The architecture doesn't really change over time, they keep the same model for years and only once a certain chip goes out of production they'll think about designing a new version but still bring over as much of the design as possible. Sourcing materials goes to whoever can provide the most cost efficient materials and the design needs to be done with spending in mind as well as you can see from all the cheap plastics used in consumer grade NAS hardware. When you compare what you get for a $500 plastic consumer grade box or you spent twice the amount on enterprise grade stuff and simply start comparing build quality, you know where you are getting the value for money. 3. Yes, the devices are centered around storage. It's in the name. But the manufacturers are making them out to be so much more these days, in a way so they can justify why you would bay $200 hardware for $500. Because it doesn't do just filesharing but also X, y and z. And you what this and that as well? Fine, go install it as an add-on. Let's not forget that these devices do not run some fancy custom operating system but usually just Linux, the most widespread OS in the world. So you encourage users with all this functionality to pay a high price and yet you provide a shit CPU. 4. Temp is not an issue. CPUs have been able to throttle themselves for decades now when needed be. So again, not a reason. You think that CPU in your laptop is keeping itself cool al the time? absolutely not. Yet it is a lot more modern, a lot more powerful and on average uses less power than the CPU in your NAS. And the heat of the drives, what do you think the giant fan is for in these things? It pushes the warm air out. 5. The biggest BS call I can make. No they are not selected because they can get more done at lower speeds. These are just regular CPUs that can't do anything more than any other regular CPU. Quite the opposite actually. These cheaper CPUs are often missing features that their more expensive brothers do have. The cheap Celerons and Atoms don't get it until years later. That's for example why only a select amount of NAS devices can do hardware accelerated transcoding of videos. A lot simply do not have the required acceleration built into the CPU or the big.little concept I mentioned before, gonna be years before we get to see that at the lowest end of the market. And sometimes, these devices lose functionality because they have to select a different CPU. Take the 920 sitting next to you. It lost the ability to decode h.265@10bit because the new CPU has no decoder for that on board, it's older the brother 918 did. The 918 also used less power, noticeably so at idle speed. Efficiency? Nope, not a consideration. The reason why NAS devices come with a shit CPU is simple: maximize profit.

I hope they start using next gen QUALCOMM inline with apple chips.

Well I have two Qnap NAS'. One is a 6 bay TVS-673e and the other is a 4 bay TS-431P3. For some odd reason the cheap TS-431P3 runs circles around the TVS-673e. The TVS-673e has 64gb of ram. Its maxed out. And it boots from a RAID 5 SSD. And it also has SSD Caching turned on. But when I go to the Home page of the TVS-673e it could literally 10 minutes before I see that page. I have to wait 10 minutes to launch and get access to the Apps app. It could take 15 minutes to get the General page of the Control Panel. However the TS-431p3 takes near seconds to pop up any app or page? I am beginning to wonder if I have a bad CPU. Its like they shoved in a CPU that they purchased in discounted lots that didn't pass muster. Or maybe someone turned the clock speed down way low as a joke. I'm at wit's end! Its either I put FreeNAS on it and replace the QNAP software. But if its because I have a bad cpu then I don't know what to do. There is no way to change out this cpu. I am so disappointed in QNAP.

I disagree with power efficiency, from my personal experience with various CPUs from both camps, the lowest end CPU are most likely less efficient them higher end parts, due to worse silicon quality, and some features cut off like advanced power managements for boosting, those low end CPUs often idles on higher minimum clocks and higher minimum voltage. I even tested recently sandy bridge mobile CPUs i7 i5 and celeron, and laptop was idles on celeron with 20% increased power consumption. On full load celeron was so slow, it's power reduction was eaten by more time to do the work, so still consumed more at the end.

You need to talk about the ability to buy a higher end i7 CPU and dropping it into the NAS. I Have a TVS-672XT and would like to upgrade the cpu to a higher core count cpu with HT.

A better question might be why NAS units use S#!t embedded SOC’s. They didn’t always. For example, older QNAP units used proper sockets that allowed for some semblance of a CPU upgrade,…

Thanks for this

Low power use, noise cooling is why NASes are NASes. They are made to move data between the Network and their disks. They often to not have the memory or CPU power to provide more demanding services True server type platforms are much hotter and power hungry in all areas.. They also famous for lots of fan noise. Consumer grade NASes are designed to live quietly, and economically, in one's home or office.. A Nas should be thought of as purely a storage device.. With a NAS for storage, any other network machine can be used for demanding CPU heavy functions. A very compact machine such as an Intel NUC or Raspberry Pi can provide efficient processing power to the network. Their limit local disk support is no longer an issue..

This only is valid for the cheap home Nas's we are still charged $2700 for eg the TVS-472 a Celeron with 10ge onboard for eg or even $800 for the 453D a Celeron again with no 10gbe onboard. Soon as the cheaper NUC;s come out with 2.5 or even 10gbe connections above home nas use, Nas's will be in trouble as the only adv over the NUCs now is the OS and faster than 1gbe connections you can get i5 nucs for $300 on special at times. Does anyone really care if there Nas costs a extra 10cents a day to run vs a decent CPU. nooo..

So you are saying that there is not a snowball chance in hell that we will ever see a M1 on a Synology Nas! Great video it all makes sense. The reality is we all buy many shiny toys not because of logic but because we just want the bigger stick, you know western culture!

YES!!!! MY GOD! WHY! Why not a Threadripper Pro instead of a Celeron! LOL. And that's why they struggle severely to stream 4K UHD Movies on Plex.

I built a 10x spec unraid server for the same price as a pre built nas. Reason 6? Theft.

Simple added reason is the low volume of these type of hardware. Low volume=high price. Also noteworthy that they are supporting with new firmware units long after their end-of-life. This adds to the costs too.

Why using a53 and a55 while there are a710/a510 cpu's. That's what I don't get.

what you do when qnap stuck trying to check file system?

I have a synology ds619 , but I'm slowly moving to a home build deskmini ryzen 5700g , 32 gb ram , 6 tb of solid state storage , and using my nas for backups. I hate to know how much that would cost if that was turned into a nas by synology or qnap, I'm running proxmox with 4 servers running emby , home assastant and windows 10 / 11 , docker all for under 25 watts from the plug idle and 110 watts max , but it is impossible to get the 16 threads to work that hard. I had problems transcoding at 30 fps with the ds619 , 100% load , now 750 fps at 50% load , I think my SSDs are the limiting factor for transcoding ?. A Celeron J4125 is o.k for running a router that is just about all . The problem with any nas the more storage you have the more junk you collect and the harder it is to keep it all safe .

To be fair I put proxmox on an i7 3770 with 32gb of ram on an old intel motherboard. It's been amazing to be fair. I run pfsense using the 2 onboard nic. And teamed the 4 port intel pro NIC. I run open media valut with zfs as my Nas part with 5 X 8tb drives passed through. I have loads of services in containers and I still have loads of resources left. I get full 112MB/s transfer speeds. I get it might be daunting for people to make their own but it makes no noise barely uses 8% CPU. And uses less than an old light bulb. And all the software was free thanks to Linux. The unit only cost me £50 for the i7. £45 for the motherboard £80 for a matched 32gb. And over £1000 on the hard drives. It's been running 2 years now and no issues

Not buying it. PC CPU manufacturers have power efficient lines as well that scale up when needed. In my opinion this is purely to protect the professional line of NAS-es. Synology does offer better CPUs but you end up in the professional spectrum with prices companies would not pay if they could get by with a decent consumer model.

The way I see it is I am paying for software for my Synology NAS and I have zero regrets buying one rather than rolling my own. Years ago I had a Cobalt appliance that did everything including hosting email and my Synology NAS does everything it did and more en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Networks

Did u say NOISE is lower then micro atx custom server? Do not think so xD

I agreed with him and it made sense until he got to rack mount servers. IF you have the same computer for both NAS and compute you are a small cheap business you should have 2 boxes for that. 1 for the hard drives and another for compute. The NAS to be as power efficient and have just enough RAM to address the many hard drives it has. the compute server again to be CPU core have and have enough system RAM and/or VRAM for what you are doing with the actual storage on the other system. This is why you have computes with 2TB of system RAM. Normally you only fill 256GB or 512GB in a compute server for reasons. Normally the reason is the data from storage will be in system RAM before more system RAM is needed. Divided up the compute load between physical computers will also make them both last longer. This will also mean each will have to have less included inside them for optimal use. Compute usually doesn't have that many hard drives in it but a boot drive to have to boot files not seat in a slow SATA DOM drive. The NAS will be like what he has in this video if not a rackmount server from an OEM that made it for you. You put them both on the same rack space and it all works out. Might be a little noisy if you go with rackmount servers instead of the kind of NAS in this video and a pedestal server. The down side of that will be less expansion to the NAS and the server most likely will be ATX with the restrictions of that form factor. For small business it is enough for big business i would suggest to get a server room and put a rack in it for rackmount servers to be. Expansion is important but not everything.

Well said. Good job mate.

Don't even try to use RAID5 or encryption on a NAS with an ARM CPU, these alone will make it a bottleneck. I'm using RAID10 without encryption on Marvel Armada XP (DS414) and the CPU is still pegged at 100% in Hyper Backup Vault. Blowed the dust out with compressed air few weeks ago, thermals normal, running cool but this CPU is too bloody slow for a NAS. We don't need Xeons, we need CPUs that will not bottleneck before all gigabit connections at the back of the NAS are fully utilized.

5:07 So now M1 is out/ about ... do we call it a scam yet ?

Given what the average Synology NAS can run in the way of virtual machines, the CPUs are doing a good job. A NAS is not a computer. It's a NAS. Thanks for the great video

If the Power Efficiency was the main goal, the NAS companies would have gone for the performant and efficient CPUs/APUs that are manufactured in newer and smaller mmanufacturing nodes, thus combining efficiency with proper power similar to many laptop/nuc architectures, instead of using the weak ones you're getting. As to the costs, yeah you're paying for the platform that the companies try to reuse/retool for years/generations, even more in NASes than in PCs, cause in NASes the manufacturers can get away with that without fear of customers switching to another manufacturer since nearly every one uses similar architecture and components... So you're paying for the platform the manufacturer has already been recuperated within probably 1st year of architecture introduction and that's it... Since noone challenges them they can do away with the old and tested weak solutions for consumer market... Saying that the diversity of services or lack thereof, or performant-enough power offered by a solution is enough to make prospective buyers believe that they are paying good money for a good solution is really stretching it - it's about in the same ballpark as saying that iphone se 2020 is a very cheap and good enough phone if not best in the imaginary category just cause Apple says so even when we all know the truth of the overall smartphone market standards and pricing... but there we have a choice, in NASes it's almost non-existent due to small number of very similar architectures in use. So no, the CPUs/APUs chosen for consumer NASes and patrtially for the SMB or small enterprises aren't there cause they're cheap for the end user, they're chosen cause the manufacturer could get a prety good deal on the product the CPU manufacturer could almost not sell anymore, and the contracts for production are for years/multiple batches. And it's cheaper to get these not-so-efficient compared to more current models, put them in a platform that does not need much rework be done due to limited and almost ancient technologies in use, and call it a day and stand to profit from the customers who still will buy the platform cause it's advertised as a newest and greatest for this application. And it sure beats a company needing to invest money to eg. take a highend very efficient and very performant at the same time newest laptop CPU, use its platform advancements to improve on the data transfer technologies that would require a new mobo with a few dollars more per attached component in total requiring reduction in profit margins on each unit sold. It's better for the business to move/advance the tech at a glacial speed and not only recuperate any new tooling or R&D but also bring money for years thereafter. And saying that low-power is good enough is kind of misleading, even the CPUs/APUs/platforms are running 24/7 it doesn't mean that the compute performance would not benefit especially since a lot of the features already offered slowly steer the NAS purpose from simple file serving/file storage duties towards application servers - instead of an instant resposne or a set of multiple VMs or containers running in a snap, or transcoding multiple streams, we're getting the very limited ancient platforms. NAS appliance manufacturers don't have to fear majority of their customers suddenly switching ships cause the competition uses same engines clad in different skin with different software, and processing units manufacturers can earn a lot on the tech nearly obsolete in other markets just because they're selling these as per multi-year contracts. I just wonder what would have happened if eg. Apple suddenly decided to combine M1 Mini and AppleTV+ and throw in a couple SATA/U.2 2.5"/3.5" slots for storage and call it M1 Network Attached Media Center for well under $1k or if Amazon created a Home/Edge AWS Node using their Graviton very multicore CPUs and combining local deployment and features typically assigned to edge servers or NASes with their AWS-like or AWS-connected remote management or WebGUI accesses ;) I bet that if any market disruptor of such a big caliber came and truly changed the status quo, we'd start seeing more competition and advancement in the processing units department throghout the regular NAS dwellers. but it does not look like there's any such a disruptor on the horizon - Apple would gladly sell you the AppleTV+ or similar, they're happy to sell the M1 Minis as well, and then on top of that a subscription on Apple cloud storage... Amazon and similar cloud providers would not reduce the chances of them scoring another long-term cloud solutions/cloud-storage subscription in favor of a piece of hardware and software they might first have to R&D, promote and then sell only once every couple of years if not less frequently - it's just not as beneficial, even they could use the platform to promote their cloud solutions/platforms by making users more accustomed to their own UIs. Big boys in server departments would not dwell in this market cause they would not risk losing customers to the lower-tiered consumer products when they always try to sell you the big-boys stuff, plus it would still cost them a bit to reengineer their regular rack solutions or desktop workstation/server solutions and mini PCs into a NAS appliance market segment they are not present in, and that's costs that may not be recuperated once the actual MVP is ready. So we're left with either DIY building blocks that you'd have to put together yourself and then support them on your own or somewhat pay-more-for-less closed garden of current market leaders' offerings with the hope of great support and ease of use even very non-techies could grasp and live with for years... It's similar to what Intel was selling for years - 4c has been enough for everything according to them, until AMD has proven them wrong in most cases with proper 6c/8c competition. But in NASes, there's no market disruptor or competition toying with vastly different and fresher platforms for the same price that's acceptable for most prospective buyers...

can we just swap the processor to i7 ? :D u know what i mean right,,

It's because they know they can milk their customers with premium costs for cheap products. Given the lack of decent competition (the NAS market is practically a duopoly) they know they can get away with it. I don't really agree with the example reasons shown in this video. And that comes from someone who just purchased a Synology DS920+. Prior to purchasing a NAS I've been using a custom built PC as a server which has been running 24/7 for close to 10 years without a single issue. That PC was cheaper than my new NAS is and contains more RAM and a more powerful CPU (and that's from almost 10 years ago). There's literally no reason why NAS hardware is terrible and still charge premium for it other than the fact that they can simply get away with it. Modern hardware is already highly efficient, very reliable, whilst still providing very good performance and at a fairly cheap price. The biggest pro's to a NAS is their dedicated software and convenient compact size (which is why I got one). If you can live without that than a custom built PC is always going to be a much better and cheaper solution.

Wouldn’t even bother buying One of these overpriced under powered pieces of junk. Build yourself a unraid server with with drives cheaper than you can buy and empty nas box for Look into it!!!!

You forgot Atom cpus 🤣

NOT NAS Drives, NAS Systems... DUH The drives themselves uses a micro-controller by the way,

Sorry but that’s pretty much all excuses, except the power argument maybe. It’s a simple reason: profit margins, oem stick in these boxes the cheapest shit they can get away with.

I think this was most log winded way to simply say - everything is to do with price. Which is obvious and that is why it is true to say that NAS CPUs are shit, yes they are cheap to make overall product cheaper, but that does not make them NOT shit... they still shit. If anyone is looking for proof then think why such thing as "shucking" exists. It is cheaper to get 20TB NAS drive with 2x10TB drives, then it is just to purchase 2x10TB drives. So if you drives already costs more then entire NAS with enclosure, board and all that stuff, then obviously the CPU running whole thing will be pennies. That is the same thing I did with my "NAS", it hardly even qualifies as NAS as it was absolute shit and if anyone is wondering I would absolutely say to avoid it at any cost (WD My could home series), I got 12TB unit in 2017 for £280, whereas 6TB drives in it were easily £220 each, they are still like £170 even today. No obviously, it was horrible experience, it was slow and nothing ever worked on it, but in the end I just took 2 drives out of it and got myself 12TB of storage. I wish I would have done it sooner. So yes - the NAS enclosures are nothing more than electronic waste with useless trash CPUs... if one is serious about their data and performance, then the way to go is to get some old PC and put some TrueNAS server on it, even $80 decommissioned Dell will do way better than any purpose built NAS enclosure. If you can get your hands on SAS drives then it will be way cheaper and faster even with the storage included. Purpose built enclosures are just half measures and ultimately waste of money, unless you can shuck drives out of them.

Cheapest price

They want money, simple.

They ARE overpriced crap. Don't try to substantiate them.

Hahahahaha!

Umm because they are NAS units and NOT desktop/laptop computers? You needed to do a video on this? Whats the next video? Why do bikes not have V8 engines?