It for me was just a mater of how much time/effort did I want to sink into it. I just wanted a large storage system. A off the shelf NAS I can be up and running in 2-3 hours. For DIY there is the research time for parts (including the drives), cases, and which software to run (there are 3-4 decent choices). Then gluing it all together. Probably 2-3 days for me fiddling around with it and research time.
Take the one I went with synology. The one I picked was in the 600 dollar range for the case. By the time your done picking a decently powered board, case and memory and cpu. You are in the same ballpark of cost for similar perf. The package was all done. I did not have to do much (notice a theme?). My most expensive part of the build? The drives themselves.
The downside is now I want something like 2.5g (or better) and the particular one I picked has zero way to upgrade (other than ripping the thing apart and hoping the right drivers are in there). It is about trade offs. Did I really want the possibility of upgrade or up and running quickly. Remember this is not something I do all the time. It is something I do every 3-4 years so I have to refamiliarize myself with all the different possible parts. Plus getting the OS in there 'just right'. Not impossible or even hard. I just chose a different trade off.
It’s an amazing project. I’m floored that it all works and that the author figured it out.
But still, I’ve never fully understood the appeal of using some of these custom design NAS products when a standard ATX computer is so much more customizable, modular, expandable, repairable, etc.
And many of these NAS systems are such a ripoff on pricing.
I don’t think desktop power consumption is all that bad if you’re careful about component selection.
Another alternative is to have one more performant system that runs a bunch of different things in virtual machines so that the NAS functionality is only a small part of the power consumption.