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title: The 10 Ways NAS is Getting Enshitified | daily.dev
description: The consumer and prosumer NAS market has shifted toward anti-consumer practices over the past 18–24 months. Ten key trends are identified: soldered...
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og:description: The consumer and prosumer NAS market has shifted toward anti-consumer practices over the past 18–24 months. Ten key trends are identified: soldered...
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# The 10 Ways NAS is Getting Enshitified

**[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 9 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

The consumer and prosumer NAS market has shifted toward anti-consumer practices over the past 18–24 months. Ten key trends are identified: soldered non-upgradable LPDDR RAM on x86 platforms, persistent 1GbE networking with multi-gigabit locked behind price premiums, drive lock-in policies (especially Synology's proprietary drive requirements), fixed low-capacity eMMC OS drives, PCIe lane throttling that bottlenecks advertised NVMe performance, recycled hardware sold as new product refreshes, a hard drive capacity squeeze inflating total cost of ownership, DRAM-less SSDs causing sustained workload bottlenecks, opaque RAM sourcing with relabeled modules, and software homogenization across Debian-based NAS operating systems. The cumulative effect is a shift from open, modular storage nodes toward locked-down appliances, pushing enthusiasts toward DIY builds running TrueNAS or similar open-source platforms.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://nascompares.com/2026/07/31/the-10-ways-nas-is-getting-enshitified>

## Community take

How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 233 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-08-01).

**TL;DR:** The community broadly agrees that NAS hardware is trending toward soldered RAM, locked ecosystems, and reduced repairability, but is sharply divided on whether DIY or prebuilt NAS is the better path — with energy efficiency, form factor, and ease-of-use cited as strong reasons to buy prebuilt, while longevity, ECC memory, and vendor lock-in concerns favor DIY or repurposed hardware.

**Sentiment:** 15% positive · 45% mixed · 40% skeptical

**The case for**

- Prebuilt NAS appliances offer dramatically better power efficiency than repurposed desktop PCs (e.g., 25W vs 125W idle), saving money on electricity over time.
- Compact form factor and toolless drive bays make prebuilt NAS units more practical for home use.
- Modern NAS OSes doubling as home servers (running Plex, Immich, Home Assistant) reduce the need for additional hardware.
- Low-maintenance DIY setups (e.g., FreeBSD+ZFS on an old PC) can run for years with minimal intervention.
- Newer brands like UGREEN offer open hardware with laptop-class CPUs at competitive prices compared to Synology/QNAP.

**The pushback**

- Soldered RAM eliminates upgradeability and creates a single point of failure, limiting future workloads like ZFS, Docker, or VMs.
- Most off-the-shelf consumer NAS appliances run outdated, unmaintained OS builds with known CVEs under active exploitation.
- Vendor lock-in (e.g., Synology blocking third-party drives in expansion units) restricts user freedom and repairability.
- The article's own website was called out as ironically enshittified — cookie consent requiring 7 clicks to reject, newsletter popups, and heavy ads.
- Drive prices have risen sharply, making both DIY and prebuilt NAS builds increasingly expensive.

**By community**

- hackernews (mixed): Commenters are split between defending DIY/repurposed-PC NAS builds and acknowledging the real advantages of modern prebuilt appliances, with side debates on ECC memory, energy efficiency, backup strategy, and the definition of 'NAS' itself.

**Hottest debate:** Whether prebuilt NAS appliances or DIY/repurposed PC setups are superior, with energy efficiency and ease-of-use favoring prebuilt while ECC memory, longevity, and vendor independence favor DIY.

**Open questions**

- Are consumer NAS appliances actually supported with security updates long enough to justify their cost and lock-in?
- What is the right definition of a 'NAS' vs. a 'home server' in the modern market?
- How should users handle backup strategy (offsite cloud vs. local redundancy) for a NAS?

**Highlights**

> >using an old PC I had and it works great. Don't know why people are so crazy about buying prebuilt NASes. The problem is the "old pc" is typically a desktop-class cpu which is very power hungry. (~100 watts).   And to make things worse, the older cpu has slower performance that doesn't justify the extra watts it consumes. For 17+ years, I used a 2008 era Intel DX58SO motherboard + Core i7 920 in a full size Silverstone tower case as my NAS.  It originally started with 1.5 TB drives and I just kept upgrading the drives all the way up to 16 TB.  It worked ok and was reliable so I was never interested in turnkey NAS appliance like Synology, etc.  I also wanted to install my own os, plus recycle/reuse/repurpose philosophy, and not be shackled by a proprietary NAS ... yada yada yada.    The big problem with re-using my old PC is that at idle, it consumed 125 watts. Electricity isn't 11 cents per kWh like it was 17 years ago.  It's now 21c/kWh -- and will keep going up because of AI, oil prices, etc. Last month, I did a lot of research to reduce the power usage and ended up buying a UGREEN DXP4800 Pro NAS appliance.  UGREEN lets you install your own os and it uses a laptop-class cpu (much better performance specs than Synology) which is much more power efficient.  At idle, it consumes just 25 watts.  Also, the Intel i3-1315U in the UGREEN has a Geekbench score of 2124 which beats the i7 920 of 450.  So 4x the performance while using 1/5th the power usage! I briefly considered "upgrading" my DX58SO/i7-920 to another old pc (2014 era) X99/i7-5820K.  That's slightly more power efficient of ~80 watts idle.  However, running ffmpeg to convert videos makes it jump to ~180w!   The UGREEN can do the same ffmpeg conversion with better performance and yet it only increases to ~45 watts. Another unexpected bonus of lower power usage is that my server room temperature is noticeably less warm, and the lower power UGREEN gets 3x the runtime on the APC battery backup when there's a power outage.  The UGREEN did cost $700 but the savings on the electricity bill will recover that in about 4 years. I also like the UGREEN toolless hard drive sleds.  The old Silverstone tower hd sleds required screws.  I also like the smaller footprint.  The NAS appliance was a total quality-of-life improvement. The only thing I "lost" from the old tower setup was the CD/DVD drive bay.  But I don't rip discs anymore so I that doesn't matter.  If I really really wanted to, I can hook up a DVD drive to UGREEN via a SATA-to-USB adapter but I hope to never buy physical media again so I don't expect that will happen.
> — [jasode on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49132835)

> Almost all off-the-shelf consumer grade NAS appliances are running unmaintainable OS yocto builds already 2 years out of support, and a list of CVE under active exploitation. The only really functional OSS NAS exception for small offices is the CephFS builds from https://www.45drives.com , and that is because of included support services. =3
> — [Joel\_Mckay on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49132724)

> No fiddling is definitely not a primary point. If one has both valuable or large amounts of data fiddling is inevitable. Nothing I have seen in retail markets is at a level of chromecast or phone setup or TV setup. And often not only the price is high but poor reliability. It is amazing that no one spoke about security in any of the child comments of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131785
> — [whyagaindavid on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49132078)

> And if you scroll down you get a popup to ask for your email for their newsletter. The irony of an article about enshittification on a site that is clearly enshittified is strong.
> — [boxed on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49132075)

> Soldered RAM being bad is an opinion, not a fact. I’ve seen way too many RAM slots go bad. Smart people always get the highest configuration in computers, unless they know they’ll never need some of the resources and can tolerate a lower option.
> — [trvz on hackernews · 4 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131799)

**Source threads**

- [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131367) · 95 points · 233 comments

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---

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