I have a gigabit connection and am disgrunted that I can't self-host most services I need without turning it into a 2nd job
It's not the best solution, but it works reasonably well with little maintenance on my part. On Windows you can set a smb drive to mount automatically at boot and it'll behave like a normal drive. So it was easy to explain to them that you can access that folder from both machines simultaneously.
I agree that this is not a good solution for someone that has to set it up themselves. In that case I'd recommend something like a Synology unit.
I use it myself heavily but that's because you can install it on top of regular debian. So you get a NAS that you can customize to the wazoo. Which I do, it runs a lot of custom scripts. I basically use OMV only as an easy GUI for adding shares, changing out drives etc. I could do it all by hand and perhaps next time I will.
However I wouldn't choose to run it if I didn't have that requirement. There's much more modern options out there.
What made you choose it yourself?
If you don't care about the small size of a NUC, an old office PC with a couple hard drives should do well.