I Spent Weeks Researching NAS Devices. Then I Just Installed TrueNAS.

QNAP or Synology?

That was the question. I wanted to run VMs, Docker containers, Plex, automated torrents, and backups. I needed something reliable, expandable, and powerful enough to handle real workloads.

Simple question. Should've been a simple answer.

It wasn't.

The Rabbit Hole

Seventy messages later, I had a $3,000 shopping cart and a spreadsheet comparing CPU architectures.

The winner was the QNAP TS-473A: AMD Ryzen Embedded V1500B, 4 cores, 8 threads, up to 64GB ECC RAM, dual PCIe slots, dual M.2 NVMe slots. It could run VMs. It could run Docker. It had expansion room.

Then came the accessories:

Seagate Exos X18 18TB — enterprise-grade, 7200 RPM, rated for 24/7 operation
Kingston KC3000 2TB NVMe — for the system volume and containers
Samsung 870 QVO 4TB SATA SSD — for Plex metadata and fast scratch storage
2× Kingston 32GB ECC DDR4 — maxed-out RAM for virtualization

I calculated vCPU allocations. I mapped out which drives would go in which bays. I researched RAID 5 migration paths for when I'd add more drives later. I even checked if the Ryzen V1500B could run quantized LLMs (it can — slowly).

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The cart was ready. My finger was on the checkout button.

Then I stopped.

The Pause

I remembered something: I was already building a server.

HYDRA09 was in progress. Ryzen 9 7950X, 64GB DDR5, 32TB of storage, a proper rack case. It was meant for compute-heavy workloads — the exact things I was planning to run on the NAS.

If HYDRA09 was going to be my main machine, what would the QNAP become?

A backup device. A $3,000 backup device.

That didn't feel right.

The Pivot

I started asking different questions.

What did I actually need?

ZFS for data integrity and snapshots
SMB/NFS shares for my devices
Docker for services
VM capability for isolation

What did I not need?

A proprietary OS (QTS, DSM)
A vendor ecosystem I'd have to learn
A separate appliance drawing power 24/7
$3,000 of hardware doing the same job as my server

The answer was obvious once I stopped looking at products and started looking at problems.

TrueNAS SCALE does everything I wanted:

ZFS with checksums, snapshots, and scrubbing
SMB/NFS file sharing built-in
Docker and Kubernetes support
VM hosting through KVM
Web UI for management
Free and open source

I could install it on HYDRA09 and have everything in one machine. Or run it in a VM. Or dedicate an old PC to it later.

No vendor lock-in. No learning a proprietary ecosystem. No $3,000 checkout.

What I Actually Needed

Looking back, I got confused by the question.

"Which NAS should I buy?" assumes you need to buy a NAS. But a NAS is just storage + network + services. You can build that yourself with any hardware.

I didn't need a NAS appliance. I needed:

Reliable storage — ZFS handles this
Network shares — SMB/NFS handles this
Containerized services — Docker handles this
A web interface — TrueNAS handles this

The QNAP would have worked. But it would have been redundant the moment HYDRA09 came online.

The Real Lesson

I spent weeks researching NAS devices because research feels productive. Comparing specs, reading reviews, building carts — it feels like progress.

But it wasn't progress. It was procrastination disguised as due diligence.

The answer was in front of me the whole time: use what you're already building.

QNAP and Synology are great products. If I didn't have a server in progress, I'd probably be running QTS right now. But I did have a server in progress. I just forgot to factor that in while I was deep in the comparison spreadsheets.

If You're NAS Shopping

Before you add that appliance to your cart, ask:

Do I already have hardware that could do this?

An old PC with a few drive bays can run TrueNAS. A Raspberry Pi can run OpenMediaVault. A VM on your existing server can host Samba shares.

NAS appliances are convenient. They're not the only option.

Sometimes the best purchase is the one you don't make.