If I was an OEM like Beelink or Servermicro I would be rushing to make an unbranded storage box, five or six 3.5 in SATA hot swap bays in front, 2-4 NVMe ports on the bottom, decent low power CPU, and an SODIMM socket or two. They’d sell a ton of them.
There’s no shortage of alternatives to Synology hardware. People buy Synology because of the software.
Tons of alternatives from other NAS vendors, but I’m not sure anyone makes a Synology type box that is a generic x86 to run your own OS. Plenty of tower server type things but I’m not aware of any little toaster type boxes.
Yeah I actually hadn’t seen that at all. There’s not many of those toaster style NAS cases, that one is fairly big as it needs a full size power supply.
What I have in mind though is basically same size and form factor as a Synology DS9xx, 4-6 3.5" bays, main board under or off to the side, 1-2 NVMe slots, low power CPU. Basically clone a Synology DS9xx but put a standard UEFI BIOS on it as well as a video output.
I think that would sell pretty well. Especially if you gave it 10 gig ethernet and a CPU that had an AI accelerator.
Could of course build the thing yourself, but it ends up bigger.
There’s no shortage of alternatives to Synology hardware. People buy Synology because of the software.
Tons of alternatives from other NAS vendors, but I’m not sure anyone makes a Synology type box that is a generic x86 to run your own OS. Plenty of tower server type things but I’m not aware of any little toaster type boxes.
You can buy a NAS case, get a cheap matx or itx motherboard and roll your own with ease. Where exactly have you looked?
Here’s one such case: https://a.co/d/eUz87Mh
Yeah I actually hadn’t seen that at all. There’s not many of those toaster style NAS cases, that one is fairly big as it needs a full size power supply. What I have in mind though is basically same size and form factor as a Synology DS9xx, 4-6 3.5" bays, main board under or off to the side, 1-2 NVMe slots, low power CPU. Basically clone a Synology DS9xx but put a standard UEFI BIOS on it as well as a video output. I think that would sell pretty well. Especially if you gave it 10 gig ethernet and a CPU that had an AI accelerator.
Could of course build the thing yourself, but it ends up bigger.
Lots of companies do. Or at the very least they make them to where you can install whatever you want yourself.