Sometimes the smartest NAS upgrade is among the simplest
I will have to admit at this point that it was quite embarrassing when I realized that the problems I was obsessing over for weeks, trying hard to find a fix so desperately in forums and videos, had nothing to do with the thing I was sure was at fault.
In the process, I checked every moving part, every touch point for issues, from drives and RAM to the OS and Docker apps, but nothing. My NAS had gotten a tad unreliable. It was not too dramatic, but it started to give me random issues, like random restarts and apps stopping to work, but they were quite a few to become noticeable and annoying. The system started to feel unreliable, and I just had to find a solution.
After much deliberate thought and research and tinkering, I found out that the real problem was electricity.
Everything was under scrutiny
Except what was really the problem
This will show you how an overthinker’s mind works. Instead of approaching the problem logically, living with the NAS has made my mind default to the most interesting theories first. Seeing the random errors, I first blamed the drive, then considered that ZFS failed the last scrub, then I went to the steps I could take to optimize the containers, and so on.
I even played with the hardware a bit, like swapping cables, rearranging the power strip, and changing the network switch layout just to ensure it wasn’t the one to blame. I spent a lot of time trying to fix unrelated problems — problems that didn’t even exist, to be honest.
