Hi @ttcbj I am on the market for a dedicated NAS device, and have heard good things here and there about the Synology brand. Would you mind sharing which model you have been using? Thanks!
One thing to note about Synology, is that they dont update their Linux Kernel over the life time of its product. I am thinking if they are making changes considering there are products being sold not long ago with very outdated kennel.
And considering the amount of polish and fixes inside BTRFS, you might want to look into it if it could be a problem for your use cases.
Generally speaking it is good enough for most consumers.
What I like about synology is the operating system/software. You can connect to it with a web browser, and it has something akin to a traditional operating system interface that lets you control all its functions.
I have found it very good as a file server for business/home office use, and as a backup target for multiple mac computers using time-machine. It also has very good online support, both from synology itself, and lots of freelance youtube/web help.
The other thing I personally really like is its "hyper backup" feature, which replicates all your NAS files (or those you choose) to the cloud, so they can be restored later.
I have also found it to be totally trouble free. I just installed the drives (they have a list of compatible ones), choose my RAID, and it has worked seamlessly for many years (I have a DS218+ as well that has worked well). It sends me emails reporting drive health, confirming backup completion, etc.
The While pricier the DS18xx range are the most common I've seen (depending on your budget). If you plan on getting one used off ebay, look out for the 1815+ and others in the xx15 generation, they had faulty intel atom chips that ended up hosing the systems sadly.
I've got a couple DS1817 's with the DX517 expansion chassis added on (total of 18 drives). They've been great for storing movies / media but unfortunately they're a bit low powered for transcoding.
I wirelessly back up my Macs and then use Backblaze B2 for offsite backups of that. I've found by combining this with the snapshot features of btrfs that this has been reliable.
My Synology is wired to my home cat 6, and the only thing stopping me from getting 10GbE to the devices that need it most is the stubbornly high prices of 10GBASE-T switches (I keep hearing it has something to do with heat (?)).
If you choose to mirror your drives, you can achieve some really good read speeds, which is nice.