For reference I own 2 x Synology, 1 x UGREEN and 1 x QNAP; and will likely replace the other machines with more UGREEN in future as long as they don't do anything stupid.
Also, while I love the convenience of Synology's software, I don't love that it's closed source. Their hardware is also fairly underwhelming for the price tag.
Same here. I have a couple of boxes running Proxmox in my homelab and I like to tinker, but I also have a DS918+ ticking away with my most important files as I just want something simple that works and is reliable
Half of the "build your own" stuff I've had over the years has at some point broken in some weird and exotic way, requiring a bit more manual upkeep and tweaking than I'd like from a box that is mostly just an SMB share
...and supposedly keeps your files, safe - at least that what keeps me from tinkering too much with such a solution.
Sure, having backups still is necessary, yet, a NAS to me is a means to an end..
there are plenty "barebones" NAS offerings that have the nice formfactor but you bring your own HDDs and OS
I don't need crazy performance or to fine tune the setup or anything, like I said it's mostly just to plug and play.
And besides the OS you need to install and maintain the apps, like backup software, photo management software, etc.
It's a pretty decent product, their browser OS for it is incredibly good and useful, the performance is pretty good and I've stuck extra ram in it, ssd for caching reads/writes (altho I have it disabled for writes).
But after what they've done recently I don't know if I'd use em again.
I know everyone jusy says "build your own!!!11" I used to be like that too I love tech. But sometimes we just want a tool that just plugs in and works, so we can reach our final goal faster.
I definitely learnt that with 3d printing, used to spend so much time fiddling with printer and never really printing until I got a bambu - then the focus was just on printing as much as I wanted, not much having to muck about calibrating each time.