Why I will never buy QNAP again

My hate of QNAP just tripled.

But let's start from the beginning. I was always lucky to get QNAP devices in a sale. But after many years of using QNAP, I wish I had never bought QNAP in the first place. I made a similar mistake once by buying a hardware VPN firewall router. Even though it was supposed to be for the SMB market, it was utterly useless even for my home network. I was better off building my own.

Back to QNAP. The first device (4-bay) had an arbitrary restriction and did not allow to use encryption when it was clearly possible to use cryptsetup manually. Besides the fact that all QNAP models for the home and SMB market have abysmal HW specs. The second device (6-bay) was a bit better, but still really bad HW, but I upgraded the memory myself. Nothing I could do about the shitty CPU though. My phone has a faster CPU and more memory. QNAP then started to install a bunch of crap onto the base system by default and it was often not possible to get rid of it. Thus I had to deal with useless crap on an already CPU and memory bound system.

I always asked myself why I would need all this uselses crap, when I only wanted to have basic NAS functionality: remote shares and a printer server. Nothing more. I had no use for transcoding, photo/video stations, surveillance, virtualization (haha - why bother on this shitty piece of HW when the base system already can't handle any type of load). The problem with this is that such solutions try to be an onestop shop. Unfortunately none of these features work that great and the biggest problem is that even the basic, most fundamental reason for having a NAS in the first place, is not working that great either. I have a 1 Gbit network and the hard disks I use are certainly not the bottleneck. They all have a higher speed than the theoretical max of a 1 GBit network. Yet, I can only transfer files with about 30 MB/s to and from my QNAP NAS. What a joke. The worst performance ever.

Then I found out - only by chance - that the new QOS 5 release removes the printer server functionality. Luckily I don't do automatic upgrades (because I have a brain), so I was safe. Or so I thought.

Yesterday I installed 4.5.4, the latest version of the QOS 4 series. All went well. This morning I woke up to an automatically upgraded QOS 5. What the actual fuck?

So the upgrade to 4.5.4 changed my settings without my permission and upgraded a system with crucial functionality to a system without that functionality (remember, I only had 2 requirements for a NAS).

I am done with QNAP, their abysmal HW, their shitty performance, and their impertinence of changing my settings without my permission. I am looking forward to building my own NAS - a system I can trust and that outperforms any QNAP system available. Fuck QNAP.