I used to do that. I had a QNAP NAS and a small Intel NUC running Arch that would host all my services. I would just mount the NAS folders via Samba into the NUC. Problem is that services can’t watch the filesystem for changes. If I add a video to my Jellyfin directory, Jellyfin won’t automatically initiate a scan.

Nowadays, I just combine them into one. Just seems simpler that way.

If you’re familiar with Linux, I highly recommend it. The flexibility is just great and you can setup whatever dashboards / management tools you need. No need to tie yourself to a specific solution IMHO.

If you’re going with Docker containers, a lot of the NAS OSes just hold you back because they don’t support all the options that Docker offers. You’ll be fighting the system if you need to do any advanced Docker configuration.

It was this nasty Intel clock drift bug: https://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?t=157459

Support was completely unresponsive and refused to do anything. Didn’t even acknowledge the issue AFAIK. I tried to add the resistor but my copy of the NAS didn’t expose the right pins so I couldn’t even solder them on if I wanted to. Then I tried mounting my drives into another Linux machine, at which point I realized they were using some custom version of LVM that didn’t work with standard Linux. I ended up having to buy a new QNAP NAS just to retrieve my data and then I returned it.

After that, I swore off proprietary NASes. If I can’t easily retrieve data from perfectly good drives, it is an absolute no go.

When my QNAP finally died on me, I decided to build a DIY NAS and did consider some of the NAS OSes, but I ultimately decided that I really just wanted a regular Linux server. I always find the built-in app stores limiting and end up manually running Docker commands anyways so I don’t feel like I ever take advantage of the OS features.

I just have an Arch box and several docker-compose files for my various self-hosting needs, and it’s all stored on top of a ZFS RaidZ-1. The ZFS array does monthly scrubs and sends me an email with the results. Sometimes keeping it simple is the best option, but YMMV.