I have owned my Synology NAS and enjoyed self-hosting with it for about 2 years now. I never self-hosted before owning it, so this is all I know. The only reason I purchased one in the first place was because of my discovery of Plex media server. Plex was great on PC for the first little bit until I realized I was outgrowing my ability to reliably host it for myself and family to enjoy and that’s what forced me to find a dedicated solution, which led me to the Synology NAS.
I wonder to myself sometimes if I would be better off building my own system with my own parts. What has stopped me I think mostly is sacrificing the Synology DSM OS, which I really do like and find good value in. I know there are Linux distros for specific NAS needs, but I haven’t had any experience with them to know if it’s a good choice for self-hosting.
Is Synology NAS the way?
What do you have?
How do you like it?
Are you planning to change your setup?
DIY always better for an all around server which is a nas but also a application server.
I have an old i7-7700T with 32gb ram in a fractal node 304 case, running Ubuntu and 3x4tb drives in zfs raidz1. There’s little it can’t handle.