I just bought a QNap TS-251+ to replace my Microserver FreeNAS since I was tired of all the sysadmin work, needed something lower profile and wanted features like automatic Google cloud storage sync. It seemed like QNap has a boatload of excellent features, and I was really hoping it works without glitches. But now that I'm stuck with it.. we'll see...
Patch support for SOHO NAS systems is miserable. We bought some Cisco and Qnap NAS systems a few years ago. Every feature I touched had some bug or another, or not the features I needed, or remote changes (Google sync, Apple Time Machine) broke a feature and it was never patched, etc. pp. …
After six months they were all reconfigured to expose a single iSCSI drive and a Linux box did everything else.
It's very well supported (running kernel 4.3 from testing now, the only thing that doesn't work is the crypto accelerator) and it gives you a lot of flexibility while keeping the advantages of the hardware (low cost, footprint and power consumption).
That would have been an interesting alternative, yes. (The NAS systems are long sold or dead, but the Linux boxes that replaced them are running Debian too.)
The hardware is decent for the price, it's just the software that's problematic.
Very similar to my experience. A multitude of features I would never want to use, partly out of doubt (security, stability, etc).
My primary need was native (robust, sane, GUI-driven) iSCSI presentation ... which it completely failed to provide out of the box. That is, with a single iSCSI target, any significant activity over a GbE link would cause the QNap to crash. QNap support guided me towards a beta release of their software -- this solved the immediate problem, but I've never felt comfy upgrading (a one way process) from that release for fear of breaking iSCSI or other basic features. A less than ideal situation.
I've been using 4-bay QNAP for about 5 years now (don't remember the model off hand). The only thing I'd recommend is that you schedule SMART tests and make sure you have the email functionality configured properly.
During that time I've had to replace two drives (I'm still running 4 x 2TB in RAID5), and rebuilds take me about 10 hours.
It's not a perfect device, but it still fits my needs for now. Eventually I'll probably build my own, likely using FreeNAS, but then I'd probably want to at least go with 8x6TB drives, and I'm not ready to spend that money yet.
Well, I've had a QNAP TS419 for years. It's been great, never had a problem, receive regular updates, has a decent package manager (optware) and decent UI.
My one complaint is that when I use the web-based file browser sometimes it tries to generate thumbnails for all the items in the current directory and ties itself up for a few minutes if there are lots. I've only encountered it a few times because I use SSH.
I just bought a QNap TS-251+ to replace my Microserver FreeNAS since I was tired of all the sysadmin work, needed something lower profile and wanted features like automatic Google cloud storage sync. It seemed like QNap has a boatload of excellent features, and I was really hoping it works without glitches. But now that I'm stuck with it.. we'll see...