On the recommendation of a colleague I recently picked up a QNAP TS-451 NAS for my home office. NAS stands for Network Attached Storage, which is a fancy way of saying "file server".
Wikipedia offers this definition of Network Attached Storage:
A NAS unit is a computer connected to a network that provides only file-based data storage services to other devices on the network. Although it may technically be possible to run other software on a NAS unit, it is not designed to be a general purpose server. For example, NAS units usually do not have a keyboard or display, and are controlled and configured over the network, often using a browser.
You can in fact attach a monitor and keyboard to the TS-451 and use it as a PC, but I don't anticipate doing this. When I want to get under the hood I do the same thing I've always done with Linux PCs - I get out a secure shell client and log in to a command line session.
I also quibble with this definition , because the TS-451, like a lot of NAS boxes out there, does much more than just serve files. But file storage is the starting point.
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Since QTS is a modified version of Linux you can also install applications from the command line, although you won't have the benefit of administering those apps via the QTS browser interface. But this can also be tricky. I've been trying to get Atlassian's JIRA installed, but I haven't had any success yet due to a slightly different version of gunzip than the one the JIRA install is expecting. You can in fact attach a monitor and keyboard to the TS-451 and use it as a PC, but I don't anticipate doing this. When I want to get under the hood I do the same thing I've always done with Linux PCs - I get out a secure shell client and log in to a command line session
For instance I decided I wanted to run Atlassian's JIRA from the NAS rather than from my desktop machine. JIRA is a Java web app, and there a QPKG for the Java Runtime Environment but not for JIRA itself. I tried downloading and running the JIRA installer for Linux but I couldn't get that to work due to an incompatible version of gunzip that caused the installer to fail. I ended up doing an install from the JIRA archive, which meant manually configuring all the settings the installer would normally handle. It was a bit of a hassle, and not recommended if you don't have prior experience with Linux, but in the end I did get JIRA up and running on the NAS.
How much memory?
The base version of the TS-451 comes with 1 GB of RAM, which may be sufficient for simple file serving but if you want to run applications as well you're better off upgrading. You can buy the TS-451 off the shelf with 4GB of RAM, at a premium price. At my local retailer the list price of the 4 GB model is $100 more than the base model, but because there was a significant sale on the 1 GB model I would have had to pay an additional $230 for the factory installed SIMM! Instead I bought a 4 GB stick of DDR3L notebook memory for $45. The memory slot is in an awkward location and requires partial disassembly of the enclosure, but the job wasn't overly difficult.
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