I have run three different NAS operating systems on the box that sits in the cupboard at home. TrueNAS for the first eight months, OpenMediaVault for six, and ZimaOS for the last year. This is the post explaining why the last one stayed, and what I actually do with it day to day.
What lives on my NAS
Before the philosophy, the concrete list. Everything important that used to be paid-for cloud is now on the same box:
- Every git repo I care about, hot-mirrored from GitHub through Gitea. If GitHub goes down for an afternoon (it does), I can keep working. If my laptop dies tomorrow, every line of code is still on the NAS and still on GitHub.
- Every film and TV episode I have ever ripped, served to the lounge TV through Jellyfin. About 4.5 TB. Browses faster than Netflix and never buffers because the file is fifty centimetres from the TV.
- Every photo from every iPhone in the house, backed up nightly through Immich. The whole family is on it. The app does face search, location search, and even semantic search ("dog", "passport", "wedding").
- A local AI on a 24 GB GPU. Gemma 3 12B running through Ollama on an Nvidia Tesla P40. The OpenAI-compatible API is reachable from any device on my tailnet, so VS Code on my laptop, the Continue extension in my editor, the chat app on my phone, all hit the same local model. Total monthly cost for AI: zero.
- Nightly encrypted backup to Cloudflare R2 as the off-site copy. About £3 a month for the storage.
Total monthly cost of the whole stack: electricity (about £4 a month at UK rates) plus the R2 bill. What it replaced: Google One Family £7.99, iCloud+ 2TB £6.99, Plex Pass £4.99, ChatGPT Plus £16, GitHub Codespaces (occasional) £8. Roughly £45 a month going to zero. The hardware paid for itself in three months.
The five real choices today
The serious shortlist for a home NAS in 2026 is short. TrueNAS Scale, Unraid, OpenMediaVault, CasaOS, and ZimaOS. Synology DSM and QNAP QTS only run on their own hardware, so I exclude them here.
| distro | best for | setup time | app store | licence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ZimaOS | Home users + small offices, app focused | ~20 min | 500+ one click apps | Open source (MIT) |
| TrueNAS Scale | Storage purists, ZFS power users | ~60 min | TrueCharts, capable but technical | Open source |
| Unraid | Mixed drive sizes, media servers | ~45 min | Community Apps, large | Paid (one off, ~£60+) |
| OpenMediaVault | Tinkerers, very low spec hardware | ~40 min | Plugins via OMV-Extras | Open source |
| CasaOS | Same audience as ZimaOS, simpler | ~15 min | 500+ one click apps | Open source |
Each of these is a good choice for a particular kind of person. I think most home users and small offices end up best served by ZimaOS for the reasons below.
What ZimaOS gets right
Install is one boot
Flash a USB, plug it in, two clicks, you are on the dashboard. There is no twelve-step wizard, no jargon, no need to know what ZFS pools are before you can copy a photo. The first time I installed it I had photos uploading from my phone in under thirty minutes.
The app store is curated
This is where ZimaOS beats CasaOS, its closest cousin. CasaOS has the same app catalogue, but the dashboard sometimes shows apps that are dead, abandoned, or do not match the current OS version. ZimaOS curates. The Immich install on ZimaOS is the current release, the volume mounts are correct, the network is set up. I have never had to drop to the terminal to fix an app from the ZimaOS store. That is genuinely uncommon in this category.
The Ollama story is good
I run Gemma 3 12B as my default model, Qwen 2.5 Coder 14B for coding, and a Nomic embedding model for RAG over my own documents. All three sit on the same GPU. ZimaOS auto-detected the Tesla P40 the first time I installed Ollama; I did not have to wire CUDA manually.
| service replaced | monthly cost | NAS alternative | one off vs ongoing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google One Family 2 TB | £7.99 | Immich | £0/mo |
| iCloud+ 2 TB | £6.99 | Immich + Nextcloud | £0/mo |
| Plex Pass | £4.99 | Jellyfin | £0/mo |
| 1Password / LastPass | £3.00 | Vaultwarden | £0/mo |
| ChatGPT Plus | £16.00 | Ollama + Gemma 3 12B | £0/mo |
| Dropbox 2 TB | £9.99 | Nextcloud | £0/mo |
| **Total saved** | **£48.96 / mo** | **~£0 + £4 electricity** | **~£540 / year** |
The company behind it is real
IceWhale Technology builds the ZimaBoard, ZimaCube, and ZimaBlade hardware. They publish ZimaOS for free, run a real community forum, contribute back to CasaOS upstream, and ship updates roughly every two weeks. That combination of "company funded by hardware, software is open, contributions go upstream" is the right shape of open source. I want to support it because the alternative is a software project that gets abandoned in eighteen months when the maintainer burns out.
x86 and "anything you have lying around"
ZimaOS installs on any x86_64 machine with 4 GB of RAM. Old desktop, old laptop, retired gaming PC, second-hand mini PC off eBay. You do not have to buy their hardware to run their software. That stance is not the obvious commercial play, and I respect it.
How I use it day to day
Code on the NAS, not just backed up to it
The way most people use a NAS for code is: laptop is the primary, NAS is a backup. I do the opposite. My active code lives on the NAS in /main/docs/code, exposed over NFS to my laptop. When I close the laptop and open my desktop, the same working tree is right there. The history is in git, the synced tree is the working state, and the NAS is the source of truth.
This breaks down if my LAN drops, so for projects I work on at coffee shops I use a Tailscale-mounted NFS over a 5G phone hotspot. It is not perfect (writes are slower over Tailscale than over LAN), but it works.
Movies in Jellyfin
The Jellyfin app on the Apple TV in the lounge is the only video app I open at home. The library is organised /main/media/Movies and /main/media/TV. The TheMovieDB metadata provider fills in posters, synopses, and cast info for free. Direct-play works for 4K HDR content because the GPU does the transcoding when a device needs it.
Photos in Immich
The biggest single win. Both phones in the house run the Immich app set to auto-backup on wifi. Within 30 seconds of taking a photo it is on the NAS, with face groups, location pins, and semantic search applied. The family album is shared across users with one click. The ten years of iPhone photos I had on iCloud got imported in an afternoon.
Local AI for everything
The Ollama API runs at http://nas:11434/v1 over my tailnet. Every device I own points at it:
- VS Code with the Continue.dev extension uses
gemma3:12bfor chat andqwen2.5-coder:14bfor code-completion in the editor. - Open WebUI on the NAS gives me a ChatGPT-style web interface with conversation history and uploaded-file RAG. I use it from my laptop when I want to drag a PDF in and ask questions.
- The Enchanted app on my iPhone gives me the same model in a clean chat UI on mobile, anywhere in the world over Tailscale.
- A handful of Python scripts use the standard OpenAI SDK with the base URL pointed at Ollama, for batch summarisation jobs that I run overnight.
bash# Same OpenAI Python SDK, different base URL. That is the whole change. import openai client = openai.OpenAI(base_url="http://nas:11434/v1", api_key="ollama") resp = client.chat.completions.create( model="gemma3:12b", messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Refactor this function for clarity..."}] )
The throughput on Gemma 12B with the Tesla P40 is around 38 tokens per second. Fast enough that it never feels slower than ChatGPT, and the token bill is "the electricity for one GPU running for ten seconds" rather than $0.01 per request.
What I do not love
No ARM support today
If you have an Apple Silicon Mac mini or a Raspberry Pi sitting around, ZimaOS does not run on it. CasaOS does. ARM support has been on the roadmap for over a year; it has not landed.
The app store has gaps
It is curated rather than comprehensive. A handful of apps I would like (Paperless-ngx in particular) need to be installed via custom Compose, which works but is slightly fiddlier than the one-click install. That said, the gap shrinks every release.
Documentation trails the code
Some of the newer features (Tailscale subnet routing, GPU passthrough for Ollama) are documented mostly in forum threads. Search the IceWhale community forum first; it is responsive and the answers usually exist.
Who I would still send to TrueNAS or Unraid
If you have a storage-focused use case and you are comfortable with technical setup, TrueNAS Scale is more sophisticated for snapshots, replication, and ZFS at scale. If you want to mix drives of every size you have lying around without buying matched pairs, Unraid is uniquely good at that. ZimaOS is not trying to win those two contests. It is trying to win the everyday "I want my photos backed up, my films streamable, my passwords safe, and a local AI on my own hardware" contest, and there it is the strongest pick.
The honest tradeoff
Every NAS OS asks you to learn something. ZimaOS asks the least. That is the entire pitch. If the choice between "spend a Sunday morning learning ZFS" and "spend a Sunday morning watching photos finish backing up" is real for you, ZimaOS is the one I would pick. The fact that it is also free, runs on hardware you already own, and gives you a private local AI on top, is what makes it the recommendation I give people without hesitation.
The full step-by-step guide (hardware, install, drive layout, apps, local AI, mobile setup, free vs paid) lives in the matching playbook: Turn an old PC into a NAS with ZimaOS.
---
I have no commercial relationship with IceWhale. I bought my own ZimaBoard with my own money. I link to them because I think the work they do is the right work.
If you want to follow more writing like this, find me on LinkedIn.