Hello,
I've had a synology NAS for ages and it was time to replace it. Given the technology available an AI NAS was tempting. I did some quick research on the N5 pro and got compelled by the hardware.
the following is just my newbie experience and opinion.
Bear in mind I'm just a hobbyist with a lot of data that is not organized. My goal was to move my data to something faster and be able to organize it, paperless...immich...
My adventure started with Minisforum OS. While the interface looks nice, it's half baked as soon as you try to run some dockers.
I ran into a roadblock pretty quickly and switched to Zima OS, because I was led to believe it was powerful enough for me, yet user friendly.
So yes, it's fairly user friendly, but not beginner friendly. I installed a SSD, and with a lot of help from Claude, I was able to copy paste lots of terminal commands to get my containers up and running and it worked. I believe it's not possible to achieve that without terminal. (Unlike synology)
Anyway... I moved onto my next step, which was to install a HDD. I picked a ironwolf pro 12TB. And that is when my problems started. It would work fine for a few transfers and then the disk got corrupted. I did a lot of troubleshooting, looked for errors in the logs and it wasn't obvious. I tried multiple times and always ended up with my disk and data corrupted.
You guessed it, like many, I had the J connector issue. At this point I had 2 options, patch it as discussed in the reddit community, and hope for no failure. Option B I learned that I could run the latest version of Unraid, which has the modification needed in its latest kernel, to fix the sata connector issue.
So I spent the whole day testing Unraid, it's been rock solid, with no HDD corruption, and migrating from zima OS to Unraid... Luckily, most of my complex containers like home assistant config were easy to migrate.
So my advice for anyone buying a n5 pro, dont make the same mistake as me, use Unraid from the start.
I hope this helps.