So, I've done a fair amount of digging and have just found out the whole backstory around crappy atom based motherboards in the XX15 NAS devices. Given Stinkology's recent sales tactics of now locking down drives and memory I think I'm done with them. <EDIT> As has been pointed out by a couple of people, I was guilty of believing what I read elsewhere on the internet. 3rd party memory seems to still work with the normal caveats for any PC regarding build quality </EDIT>

The NAS died when I applied the latest update - it never came back from reboot, and I walked over to the enclosure to find the flashing blue power light problem. While I may be able to get the thing back up temporarily, I'm not sure I want to bother. I'd rather put a permanent solution in place now and be done.

Problem is, I've got five new-ish drives (RAID5 @ 50% capacity) in the 1515 and a 5 bay extender with another 5 drive RAID5 array (90% of capacity). I really need to keep the data in those arrays, which I believe may be possible if I build a Ubuntu based PC NAS? \** Unfortunately I don't remember which FS I used for the arrays. **\**

Having watched a disassembly video of the 1515 (<EDIT> It was actually a 415 , but I'm guessing it will be the same connector) I see that the drive cage is mounted to the atom based motherboard via a PCI-e connector.

My questions are:

- If I get a celeron based motherboard with an NVMe drive and install Ubuntu, and then put the connector from the drive cage of the 1515 into a PCI-e slot, will Linux recognize the drive array if I maintain the correct drive order?

- If I get a 10 bay case and throw the drives into the case and manage to connect the drives to the motherboard in the correct order, will the array be recognized that way?

- <EDIT> Since the expander uses eSATA to connect to the DS1515 , should I be able to plug that into an eSATA port on the new machine and get a smaller case? </EDIT>

- Is there a better option than Ubuntu - TrueNAS?

- Any other recommendations for how to approach this? To clarify, I'm an old-school Windows sysadmin but a UNIX weenie - if it's as easy to use as DSM that would be great, but I don't want to be getting too crazy on the command line during install, if possible!

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Thank y'all in advance for any suggestions.