Building my own NAS taught me why prebuilt enclosures are holding you back

A personal account of transitioning from prebuilt NAS enclosures (Synology, Asustor) to a custom-built NAS using the Fractal Design Node 804 and TrueNAS Scale. The author explains how prebuilt systems become limiting once you push beyond basic storage — weak CPUs, limited RAM, vendor lock-in, no PCIe expansion, and software that tries to do too much. The custom build offers ECC RAM, multi-core processors, 10GbE upgradability, and a clean separation of concerns where the NAS only handles storage while a separate Proxmox node handles virtualization and containers.