So I decided to migrate a server I built to a NAS. I did this for several reasons. (1) The case I used was not a server case, thus it had no hot-swappable drives. This was a big problem because one of my drives developed bad sectors and needed a warranty replacement. (2) I wanted/needed a device that could also be used for security cameras. Just replacing my case with one that had hot-swap bays would not satisfy that. (3) I wanted something that would make sharing my TV recordings through the network easier, something better than Plex even though I will still be using Plex. (4) And I wanted to learn more about NAS because I want to discourage my customers from using servers when all they are doing is sharing files.

So now that I determined that I needed/wanted a NAS, now I needed to determine which one to get. I still needed to run Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials, which meant I needed a powerful NAS that supports virtual machines. This limited me to NAS that use either Intel or AMD processors. I decided on one with the Ryzen processor because it is just as good as the Intel ones — especially with the Meltdown bug — and because I don’t need to pay extra to get something with Thunberbolt in it, seeing as that standard is about as popular as gangrene. A 6 core Ryzen will outperform a 4 core Intel with the Meltdown fix. This is why I decided on the QNap TS-x77 line of NAS.

This blog post will be a constant work-in-progress with few updates.

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