I’m looking for a compact NAS to back up events from my video surveillance system. Two drive bays is enough, maybe four at most. They can be 2.5" or 3.5", SATA or SAS, preferably populated with mechanical drives but even with reliable SSDs. It doesn’t need to handle more than a few GB per day of throughput and 16TB of total storage would be more than enough so it doesn’t need to support even more massive drives. I don’t care if it’s complete product like a Synology or something built from scratch using an SBC and adapters; all I need is RAID 1 and an SMB/CIFS file share, though I would like to keep costs low. My house is wired for Ethernet so wifi would just be a bonus but it might help to hide the device somewhere a burglar isn’t likely to see it like they will the NVR in my server rack. Also, a GNU/Linux-based OS is obviously mandatory or else I wouldn’t be on Lemmy.
Terramaster had some pretty gnarly security issues that they badly handled in the past. No big deal if you keep it walled off from the internet, but their software would never let you know it should be kept away from any internet access.
Also, if you get one of their units that has an ARM chip inside instead of an intel one, there is basically no chance you’re ever going to be able to use anything other than the software that they have by default. This makes the security issues impossible to resolve without completely removing internet access to the device.
Their x86 models are fine as you imply, just avoid ARM and you can install any OS you want.