eRacks Systems Tech Blog

The Apps Were Never the Box: Why We Build Open NAS Systems

An XDA Developers writer published a piece last week that we could have written ourselves. He kept his Synology NAS (network-attached storage: a box of drives on your network that serves files and apps) and walked away from almost every app Synology ships with it. His photos moved to Immich, his music to Navidrome, his movies to Plex and Jellyfin, his documents to Paperless. All of them run in Docker, a way to package an app with everything it needs so it runs the same on any Linux machine.

His reasons are specific. Synology Photos, in his words, is “pretty dated”: no major new features in a while, and missing the GPS tagging, import workflows and shared libraries Immich has, with a mobile backup he found less reliable. Synology’s music app is “not very good at all”. And Synology discontinued its own video streaming app, which leaves a basic DLNA server as the only first-party option.

We have been saying this for years. It is worth saying why.

A NAS is two things

Every NAS is storage plus the apps that use it. Appliance vendors sell the two as one product, and for a while that was a fair trade: the apps were the reason to buy the box. Docker ended that. The open-source apps now move faster than the vendors’ own, which is the writer’s first reason, and because they are containers, they do not care which hardware they run on.

The XDA writer makes the point himself. His apps are “as independent as possible”, so if he moves from Synology to another brand, or to his own server, Immich comes with him. A proprietary app cannot make that promise, and neither can a vendor that decides which of its own apps survive the next release.

Once the apps are open, the box is just storage. And storage should be open too.

What open storage looks like

This is how we build NAS systems, and have for a long time:

• ZFS by default. ZFS is an open-source file system that checksums every block, so it detects and repairs silent corruption instead of serving it back to you. Our NAS line defaults to RAIDZ2, dual parity: any two drives can fail without losing data.
• The drives talk to ZFS directly. We offer an HBA (host bus adapter, the card the drives plug into) in IT mode, which passes each drive straight through instead of hiding it behind a hardware RAID controller. ZFS sees the real disks and their health.
• Standard NAS drives. Our current default is the 24TB Seagate IronWolf Pro, a CMR drive (conventional magnetic recording, the kind that behaves well in a rebuild), bought in the channel like any other part. If a drive fails in year four, you buy another one anywhere.
• Your choice of operating system. Ubuntu LTS by default, or Debian, TrueNAS Community Edition, OpenMediaVault and others. The data outlives the choice: a ZFS pool exported from one machine imports on another running a current OpenZFS.
• Sizes that fit the job. From NAS4, a 1U four-bay unit, to NAS100, 102 bays in 4U, plus the QUIET3 for a home or an office where a rackmount fan would be too loud.

The same apps, without the vendor in the middle

Immich, Jellyfin, Plex, Navidrome and Paperless run on any of these systems exactly as they run on the XDA writer’s Synology. The difference is what sits underneath: an operating system you can update on your schedule, a file system you can move, and hardware with no vendor deciding which parts or apps you may use. Name the apps you want and we install and test them before the system ships, the same way we set up TrueNAS with Jellyfin on a quiet media server this month.

To be fair to Synology: if you want an appliance you never think about, and you are happy with its apps, it is a reasonable buy. The writer still uses his as the backbone of his setup. But if you are already running your own apps, as he is, part of what the appliance price pays for is software you have stopped using.

Where to start

The full NAS line is configurable online, and our July post covers how we re-verified every default drive and part against this year’s shortages. The XDA article is here.

Tell us what you store and which apps you run, and we will size it. Write to info@eracks.com, or start with a quote request.

joe September 24th, 2026

Posted In: NAS, News

Tags: Docker, Immich, Jellyfin, NAS, Navidrome, Open Source, self-hosting, Synology, TrueNAS, ZFS