As the title suggests, has anyone tried installing custom firmware, specifically TrueNAS or UnRAID? If so, what was your experience?
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You would need to disclose your NAS model
I have a TS-673A
You need to throw a GPU in there (as your NAS lacks a monitor output)
And after install any OS on your liking, as this is a regular x86/x64 computer
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I tested unraid on a old 453 for a month. It ran ok but I wasnt convinced that I would want it on any of my primary NAS
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I know, I have an old 1030 that is compatible with my model.
What is the reason for not being convinced to run on it? I am not very impressed with the QNAP software solution; it lacks features, and some of the existing features are not yet complete. Not to mention the UX. I do come from the Synology world, where things are a bit more tidy, so I was expecting a bit more. Did you install it on the Qnap eMMC or one of the NVMe drives?
Then go ahead … nothing stopping you, change the default boot device in your BIOS (from the internal DOM/Flash to a USB stick for instance) and install any OS on it…
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The Celeron in the 453 is a much slower processor than the embedded Ryzen in your 673A
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+Embedded+V1500B&id=4304
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+J1900+%40+1.99GHz&id=2131
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Unraid runs off a USB so you dont have to kill the QNAP stuff just change the boot device as mentioned. To me its a stripped down OS which I think it the appeal to many who use it. The way it handles disks/shares/etc is all different as well so it was a bit of learning curve. There isnt anything wrong with it and it should run just fine on the 873.
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Did you try to import the existing storage pools, or did you start from scratch?
I do plan to do that, just wanted to hear what others have done, you know, try to learn from others’ mistakes 
I have a backup of my NAS, and I have to move some VM’s to another NAS so I have an infrastructure running while I install this. Do you know if the NVMe disks can be used for OS? Not sure if the two M.2 slots can be configured as a RAID for OS installation, since I am not using them for storage…
I think you can boot from any storage device, the RAID config would have to come from your OS of choice though, because QNAP uses software RAID.
Also you would have to kill all your disks as the QNAP storage pools are probably not readable (and there is other partitions on the disks as well for the OS)
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Somehow I was hoping that UnRAID could maybe import the RAID structure and Storage pool since the config is on the disk, but it does not matter, I’ll just have to restore everything back. Have you ever tried installing an alternative firmware yourself?
Not on the NAS itself, only in virtual machines.
I have seen it discussed many times, only issues are potential exotic drivers for the display (So it would always show >>>>system booting<<<<)
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I am not using anything exotic, just 10 virtual machines like infrastructure servers (dhcp, dns, mail, web, home assistant…) and 8 containers like Immich, pricewatch, cloudflare, portainer and hishtory server, so nothing really heavy. I’ll give a run probably next weekend 
I meant QNAP uses an ‘exotic’ controller for the display in the NAS units, but your NAS does not have a display anyways, no harm
Depending on how much demand these VM and containers have … that might be pushing a 4000 passmark though
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Not much, all virtual machines and containers are using on average 6-8% of CPU, unless I do bulk upload of video files to Immich - then it can go wild, but I have limited Immich to 2 CPUs, so that’s home safe now as well
Yesterday, I worked with both TrueNAS and UnRAID, and I find myself more inclined towards TrueNAS, primarily due to its ability to install the operating system directly on an NVMe drive in RAID1 (huge plus for this!). In contrast, UnRAID relies on a USB device for booting, which—regardless of brand—has proven to be unreliable in my experience. That said, it’s worth noting that QNAP’s OS also boots from USB, so in that regard, it’s a fair comparison.
At present, I’ve reverted to using QNAP’s operating system. The main reason is that neither TrueNAS nor UnRAID offers native support for the OVA virtual machine format. Since this NAS functions as my primary system for virtualization, switching platforms would require extensive downtime due to the need for image conversion.
I do, however, plan to acquire a smaller QNAP NAS for off-site backups. This setup will allow me to thoroughly test the virtualization capabilities of both TrueNAS and UnRAID in a non-critical environment.
Only the setup bootstrap…the rest boots from disk (all internal disks have spanning RAID1 with the actual OS on it)
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