Reasonably priced NAS w/plenty of RAM, 4 drives and VM's.

I’ve now tried 5 NAS systems that claim to support VM’s. My latest endeavor was a Terra-master, 32 GB RAM w/VirtualBox. NOT ONE of them made me happy! About 10 years ago I owned a QNAP that was reliable and affordable.

I actually still own it, but it doesn’t support 4, 3 tb drives, nor Virtualization. Whataya got? I’ll run ONE virtual machine. Ubuntu server, no GUI. Very light weight. Low resource requirements.

I tried one recently but it kept crashing on me. Just locked up or lost connectivity. Mayhap I should have exchanged it, but at 82 years old, I don’t have a lot of patients. Synology is a good bet, but they come out with new firmware that eliminates the support of typical hard drives, until you have to buy their brand.

I already own the drives and cannot afford to replace 4 drives! Nothing is mission critical except for the most recent backups of PC’s. I have a backup of the VM on my MS One Drive. It’d suck to lose the VM for a few days, but it’s for testing an app a friend is developing.

The system need only support that one VM and shares for backups of 3 PC’s. It doesn’t need any GPU or HDMI, 1 Ethernet is fine.

My max budget is $700.00 but I doubt I need to spend that much.

TIA!

You will not get a NAS with “plenty” of RAM in this economy for around 700USD.

Your best bet is too keep your old NAS (I know of no QNAP NAS from the last 17ish years that does not support 4x4TB drives, in whatever array config) and then use a 2nd hand desktop or laptop for your VM.

You won’t find a NAS that will sufficiently run VM for $700 in any economy.

IMO, if you want to run just a single server then skip the “virtual” part. Buy yourself a $700 PC and install Ubuntu on it.