I do infrastructure stuff professionally and wanted to not manage that at home so just went for a Synology.

Just depends on how DIY you wanna go. I’ve had my Synology for years and it’s needed zero ongoing maintenance and has never had any problems so I’m pretty satisfied with it.

I debated the same with myself. I went with Synology and haven't looked back. It just works without me having to think about it.

When I was evaluating a NAS, I ended up DIY because it was easier, less expensive, and had better specs than what Synology was offering. You can run TrueNAS.

Nobody mentioned the high amount of security issues in Synology products over the years, plus the fact that their OS is closed-source so impossible to audit, plus the fact that they will straight up stop offering OS and security updates for legacy products after some time.

So, for me, it is a no-go.

As I get older, the more I realize that minimalism and simplification tend to be a priority when it comes to tech things, because should something happen to me, there's no damn way anyone in my family would be able to figure out how to continue keeping things running if I went all DIY.

So... I got a Synology NAS, which is easy to use and maintain. Photo backups, file backups, and our media collection are easy to access.

I went from rolling my own (proxmox then unraid) to synology 1019(2). I dont have the time to manage and tweak boxes anymore and the synos just work. 200 tb total and happy as a clam

OP, I too have been looking for a form factor like the off-the-shelf NAS units but the ability to run my own OS.

Terramaster has heard our prayers. Their F223 and F423 have the TOS on an USB drive, which you can remove and install your own OS on either another USB drive or on an NVME drive (or both NVME drives).

I have been using Synology NAS for a decade now, currently still running a DS918+.

What I want to tinker with I can do with docker, but often I don’t, because that’s my “cloud” for most everything and stability is priority one. So far, Synology delivered on that without fail. It’s an amazing product company.

I bought my DS218+ because it was the best of their price for me, I wasn't thinking so hard about the O.S. because I never used one for that kind of tech.

Luckily it resulted to be awesome and really scratches my Linux itch (I have a MacBook Pro) it supports docker so it is pretty much my only "server".

DSM is a nice frontend but I don't know better to be honest.

I went the lazy route with 1st a 215J with 2 2TB disks (mirrored for important data) and en external 3TB disk (backup/expendable data) and it got company from a 220j with 4TB disks internal and a 5TB external (same use as the 215j)

However, those are just for local data storage for me and my wife (picture), music library and a few static websites. Nothing fancy or demanding.

As I work in IT and mess about with more interesting environments, I wanted something simple at home. (next to my RPis that make up the rest of the server park, which we access via laptops) Main laptop here is a 14th gen i9 with 64 GB mem, so enough power to mess about when I'm behind it, but it's off when I'm not.

I'd go for DIY with expensive/demanding requirements, pick an entry level when you just want to dump data and access it once in a while.

Synology is fine, but in my case I wanted to run other apps as well, so I went with Nextcloud on a VM with Proxmox as the hypervisor. I have total control and no lock-in.

In your usecase, it probably doesn't matter. I usually suggest DIY with more disks and XigmaNAS for ZFS and RaidZ2 or RaidZ3 depending on disk size and number. The cost is usually in the disks, and I tend to prefer smaller disks and more for cheap replacements when they die, cheaper initial purchase, and getting more spindles so I can use cheaper "everything" and still get decent performance. I usually wouldn't consider a 2 bay NAS myself, mostly because I'd just do what you're already doing and plug in a large single external disk. In the past (15 years ago now though) the single disks lasted quite a long time, though I did buy internal disks and used my own enclosures. Recent Amazon reviews imply that is the best plan even today in that model because the prebuild MyBooks etc at 12TB or whatever are supposedly horrifically unreliable, but maybe you've had better luck.

I started with a DS216Play back in 2016. It's been running 7 years non stop. It can serve so much including Plex but the cpu is too weak to do serious transcoding. I recently pulled the trigger on a DS220+. As before I got WD Reds as my older 5400rpm have worked so well over time. You can do your own research but at present only intel based can really transcode.

I use my NASes as the primary storage class in my k3s via nfs provisioned. More recently I setup a functional docker registry and portainer.io instance on them.

Honestly I think you'll be happy either way. Synology is very very good at some things. And the software makes it very easy and approachable to spin up a lot of private cloud type stuff without a lot of technical messing around. That said, you will get more hardware/performance for your dollar with a PC server. You can go the DIY route, or if you don't mind a little more power consumption and want more performance buy a used Dell PowerEdge on eBay. Based on what you say, I think you'll be happy either way. The real value you get from Synology is their software. Their photo app is very wife friendly. And I don't think you'll find any serious restrictions with it, you get full root SSH access into the box.

So I guess my suggestion would be evaluate the photo management in TrueNAS versus Synology. You can spin up a virtual machine of TrueNAS on your desktop and play with it if you want. The only other gotcha is if you want Plex to do transcoding you definitely want the PC because you can throw in a GPU and accelerate that a lot.

//edit- the one other thing to mention is backups- Synology has GREAT backup software and it's free. Active Backup for Business will back up your desktop/laptop, versioned, deduplicated, very efficiently. And Hyper Backup will backup your Synology itself (or some parts of it) to the cloud, optionally with client-side encryption. I suggest Wasabi as the backend for that, it's only like $7/TB/mo. Or just get another Synology and put it at the house of someone you know and you have an instant offsite backup with no recurring cost.

I love my Synology. It is my gateway to self hosting. Get one that can run Docker and you’ll scratch most of the itches.

Did Synology when setting mine up. Fairly simple to set up and manage. I did upgrade the memory using a 8GB samsung unit (the synology branded was like half the capacity and twice the price) to beef it up a bit. Been working great for my purposes

Im hosting a Xpenology server ony my old gaming rig.

I got a Synology years ago hoping to do this, but I didn't do enough research and the model I got couldn't quite decide and stream very well. I ended up just using it for backup and using my PC as a Plex server for a while. I eventually got an Nvidia Shield and just plugged in a large SSD to it and that works well.

I perceive both QNAP and Synology as massively flawed tech, that can't be relied upon. Too many occurrences of both going haywire for no good reason, crashing, destroying HDDs and so on and so forth.

For home appliance, I'd rather buy an old i3/i5 rig, upgrade it a little, put some storage space on it and rely on a scheduled batch script to send critical folders/files from all connected devices to it, than buy this overpriced and overhyped piece of crap.