Off-topic, but how do you like Synology? I'm familiar with one of their units for work, but I'm looking into a new NAS for my home, and I'm trying to decide between Synology or building my own and putting Nextcloud on it.
I've tried running apps on it, and the ones that are available are decent, but I pretty quickly got to where I needed to SSH in to make certain things happen, and that felt weird for an appliance like this. I added Docker and ran a bunch of stuff on that, and that was kind of a pain. They don't make it easy to update the images and the community's solution is to SSH in and install watchtower to do it.
I'm now just using it for network file storage and running all those services on a Linux box instead.
I thought about just putting the drives in the Linux box, but I did some network testing and the NAS was faster, and it provides a lot of storage-related niceties, so I'm keeping it in the mix. For instance, I recently decided to upgrade the drives to faster, larger ones, and it's been pretty easy.
After $300 per unit S. has only two advantages:
1. Form-factor: you can build a comparable small enough unit from OTC/OTS parts but usually it costs at least $200 more
2. Basic functionality (ie filesharing eg with SMB) just works, with a nice webgui to configure it.
If you need something more...
It's photo app is NPM garbage. Sure, I have an ancient ds115j (armv7@800Mhz, 256Mb RAM), but I couldn't use it.
But despite it's ancient-ness I was able to update it to the latest Synology OS (DSM), which tells how S. is supporting their products.
So be sure to get a version with enough RAM, I would go for 2Gb+ versions in your place, so avoid ds220j and ds218play, look at ds218 (without 'play' suffix) or ds220+. Oops, their site says VMM is supported only on DS220+, so I think you have no choice there, but 220+ has an additional memory slot, which could be handy.
For literally $300[1] you can't do better.
However, there is a way to install DSM on non-Synology hardware, so if have a desktop PC to run it I would advise for you to test it out.
[0] https://www.synology.com/en-global/products?chassis=Desktop&...
[1] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1570595-REG/synology_...
By the way, do you run software like Nextcloud, or are you just using it as a storage tank?
I still use it but plan to build a server this winter and gift the synology yo my father.