551
Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy
(www.howtogeek.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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And as usual everyone is saying NAS, but talking about servers with a built in NAS.
I'm not saying you can't run your services on the same machine as your NAS, I'm just confused why every time there's a conversation about NASs it's always about what software it can run.
The way I see it, a box of drives still needs something to connect it to your network.
And that something that can only do a basic connection costs only a little less than something that can run a bunch of other stuff too.
You can see why it all gets bundled together.
For me it's not about what else I can run on it. I want my services separated from my storage devices. If I throw everything into one physical machine it takes everything down if something goes wrong. It's also harder to do upgrades without needing to replace entire machines
At this point you're just fighting semantics. Even a commercial NAS is reliant on the software too, like with Synology. They run the disk management but also can run Docker and VMs with their built-in hypervisor.
If we lose the meaning of the word NAS then we can't effectively talk about it. And enough new people are coming in and being taught that a NAS is the thing that runs Plex that it's sometimes impossible to have a conductive conversation.
What in the hell are you talking about