Since I've decided to wait and see if there's a 2022 version of the DS920+ coming soon, in the mean time, I'm wiping my old unused Hackintosh/PC and installing TrueNAS CORE on it as an experiment. This old box has a 12-year-old motherboard and CPU (i5-750 2.66 GHz 4-core), but it has an SSD for it's boot drive and 16 GB of RAM. Buuuut it's effectively
free, and I have it
right now.
I still need to buy a couple new drives, but I'd have to buy new drives anyway for the Synology.
I've been reading up on the history and state of TrueNAS, and now I realize I was mistaken in my original post when I described it as a community-run Linux distro. It's actually based on FreeBSD, which
arguably makes it closer to macOS's roots since Darwin was also based on FreeBSD, and it's the product of a company called iXsystems that has maintained it for ~11 years (they've been doing BSD stuff since the '90s) as a part of their business for selling hardware and professional support to enterprise customers. The relationship feels a bit like Fedora/CentOS to Red Hat in that regard but with a sharp focus
specifically on storage.
My plan is to use this old machine as my NAS and to run a long ethernet cable (I didn't realize we're up to Category
8 now!) around the perimeter of our downstairs room that has our Google Fiber jack into a nearby closet until I have a better wiring solution. I'll need roughly 30ft/10m of cable which should be
plenty safe within the stable distance (100m, IIRC).
Since this is going to be an experimental system, I plan to adhere more stringently to the 3-2-1 strategy. The NAS will be my primary live storage, but I'll periodically back up its
entire contents to an external drive (I'm nowhere close to filling 14 TB
yet), and I'll periodically back up the
most critical files to Google Drive like I do today (no Backblaze account yet, but maybe one day).
I'll keep sharing my experiences here since it seems like I'm the only one going down this kind of DIY route.
In a few months, assuming there's news about the next generation Synology DS9xx+, I'll decide then whether I'll buy a proper appliance or budget the same amount of money to replace this old PC with modern parts.