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.

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 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.

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.

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.