[bane]

I personally think big-box computer retailers that build custom turn-key computers (e.g. Microcenter) should get into the NAS game by partnering with unraid and Fractal. It's as turnkey as any commercial NAS I've ever used but comes with way more flexibility and future proofing and the ability for users to get hyper technical if they want and tweak everything in the system.

It's wild how much more cost effective this would be than pretty much any commercial NAS offering. It's ridiculous when you consider total system lifecycle cost (with how easy it is to upgrade unraid storage pools).

Looking right now and my local Microcenter builds essentially three things: desktop PCs, some kind of "studio" PC, and "Racing Simulators". Turnkey NASs would move a lot of inventory I'd wager.

[QuiEgo]

I think the Terramaster NASes are about as close to this as you can get, they even have an internal USB header that seems purpose-added for the Unraid boot disk.

That said, I prefer straight Debain to Unraid. I feel Unraid saves you a weekend on the command line setting it up the first time (nothing wrong with that!), but after playing with the trial I just went back to Debian, I didn't feel like there was $250 of value there for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Almost everything on my server is in Linuxserver.io Docker containers anyways, and I greatly prefer just writing a Docker Compose file over clicking through a ton of GUI drop downs. Once you're playing with anything beyond SMB shares, you're likely either technically savvy or blindly following a guide anyways, so running commands through ssh is actually easier to follow along with a guide than clicking in a UI, since you can just copy and paste. YMMV.

[bane]

You have good points!

For me, eliminating the few hours dealing with some stupid config option I messed up is easily worth $250, which unraid basically makes go away. But yeah, most of the things the system does are really just some basic linux distro with various bits installed.

The terramaster NAS's are surprisingly reasonable for pre-built NASs. And I think they'd be fine if you want an <4 bay NAS solution.

There's a few tiers I think of home NAS users:

0 - add an external hard drive to my base machine, maybe share it (or the content) to other users on the network

1 - put the drive on the network, there's a bunch of OEM "drive on your network" options there

2 - the 3-5 bay home NAS user. Used to be a medium user, but now can easily hit ~100TB.

3 - the greater than 6 bay home NAS user.

At some point, I moved from #2 to #3 and decided that I had enough spare drives lying around that it was worth it to invest in a big case and centralize everything in one box. It's around this time that I think the cost efficiency of the NAS hardware really left me behind.

A 6-bay terramaster is around $500 and provides an N95 and 8GB of memory. So basically in rPi5 territory.

A 12-bay terramaster is like $1800 is with an i7-1255U and 16GB of memory.

I built a 16+ bay unraid system this year for around $1500 that included an i9-12900k and 128GB of memory + an unraid lifetime license. I know I'm a #3 NAS user, but the different in price is a bit, for less capable equipment.

You could build the same system, and save about $400 if you put it together and just put some linux distro on it.

I guess that point I was making originally still stands, I think these retailers could build really nice NAS options on a big price undercut. At volume I bet they could negotiate moving unraid licenses for much cheaper as an OEM option.

Note: Yes! I acknowledge none of these choices really include the actual drives, any of these options might allow for a gradual in-fill and replacement of drives over time.

[QuiEgo]

Good points as well :)