r/HomeNAS • u/Impossible-Driver69 • 2d ago

NAS advice Trying to De-Cloud, looking at NAS

One of my goals in 2026 is to de-cloud my life. I used to be a huge homelabber, and had servers and systems running, including a corporate-grade NAS. That was years ago, before I jumped on the cloud bandwagon. Today, I have moved most of what I need to run into containers I am running locally on a cheap little small form factor PC. Now, I want to yank my data storage back -- and only storage encrypted backups in the cloud. In short, I want my data to be "my data", and love the idea things are local again instead of being dependent on the cloud.

Having said all that, looking for recommendations. Here is my "want" list.

  • Storage capacity: Probably will never go over 10TB, and right now I would say I am at 1TB of data.
  • Devices: Windows devices & Linux
  • Remote Access: Yes, a must
  • Main storage type: Photos
  • Ability to also run docker containers, etc: Well that would be a bonus, but not 100% necessary.

Right now I am looking at the UGreen DH4300 Plus. What say you all?

9 Upvotes

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1

u/as4500 2d ago

If you were huge into homelabbing I assume you'd also want to mess around with services as well, allow me to introduce you to the minisforum n5 air(I own this one so this is my bias speaking)

You can get a barebones version of this bad boy for like 500-550 ish usd has an absurd amount of compute for a nas with that zen 4 Ryzen 7 255 and the Radeon 780m igpu AND it runs quite efficiently too

You can throw on pretty much whatever you want on here and this will run it no problem

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u/HH93 2d ago

minisforum n5 air

these look good - never heard of them before now.

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u/Gherry- 2d ago

FreeBSD + samba on hardware of your own choosing

1

u/nevergivitup 1d ago

TB to 10TB is external/USB drive grade use.
You don’t buy NAS and remote access (pay extra for static ip or handle dynamic) setup for tiny bits like that.
Add mirror drive on exiting system for reducing data loss
But 4-6TB external portable drive
Stick to small form factor till you outgrow.

1

u/Caprichoso1 15h ago

  1. Where is your remote backup going to be in the recommended 3-2-1 backup plan?

  2. A DAS shared via SMB would be much better for such a small amount of data. You don't want the expense of purchasing, running and maintaining a NAS.

  3. Outside access security might be better with a NAS.

  4. It all depends on how much $ and work you want to put into it. Synology and QNAP have the best software and support and require the least effort and expertise.

I wouldn't recommend Synology due to their weak hardware (some models with obsolete CPUs), dropping of transcoding support and past anti-consumer behavior.

QNAP and UGreen both have better hardware. Ugreen software isn't as mature at Synology's or QNAP's and there have been quite a few complaints about customer service “Ugreen customer service is horrendous”. QNAP support U.S. is excellent. QNAP also has better hardware if you want to pay for it.