I'm something of a data hoarder. 20TB array of four disks.

I tell everyone who is interested in this "hobby"; Synology. Their products are, bar none, the best in the industry. I'd estimate that their direct competition will never catch up. They're so easy to use and maintain, I would assert that if you can install a web browser and check your email, you could run a Synology NAS. And the prices don't even have much of a surcharge over DIY (maybe 30%? you could DIY a server for pretty cheap with hand-me-down enterprise hardware, so hard to compare, but Synology's prices are very fair).

Let me outline a few things Synology does that makes your life so much easier:

- All of the administration happens through a web portal. And its not a basic, geeky portal. Its literally a full desktop. They've implemented windowing, minimizing/maximizing, desktop shortcuts, a start menu, it feels like a literal desktop running in your web browser. Just YouTube some videos of "Diskstation Manager".

- But, its also just Linux. You can SSH into it. It supports everything Linux does.

- They don't use ZFS or mdadm; they've implemented their own raid system they call "synology hybrid raid" (SHR). It supports surprisingly smart heterogenous drive size utilization while still maintaining N-Drive redundancy; with, for example, a 2TB+4TB+6TB+8TB drive combination in SHR-1 (RAID-5 equivalent), only 2TB of drive storage is totally unused (12TB storage + 6TB redundancy). Traditional RAID-5 would leave 12TB unused [1]. They put btrfs on top of it, so its not totally custom.

- When a drive goes bad, the physical unit starts beeping at you. No configuration necessary. You can see which drive is dead via the LEDs on the front, swap it out without turning the unit off, and a rebuild begins; you don't even have to visit the amazing Admin UI if you don't want to. You can also have it email you if you want, which is far easier than setting up an email notification on a bare linux server.

- It has an app store. A server app store! Want Plex? One click and you're online. Want Minecraft? Done. Want backups? Their "hyper backup" software supports a dozen targets including another Synology NAS, their own cloud storage, Google Drive, S3, Azure, SFTP, RSync, a USB drive, Dropbox, bunch of other stuff, it supports encrypted backups, it supports incremental backups. Want dynamic dns? Built in, with multiple providers including Synology's own, no cost. Wordpress? One click. MariaDB? One click. Email server? Done. MediaWiki? LDAP? OAuth IDP? Easy. All of this is as simple as installing a web browser. Actually, its simpler.

- Want to share external links with friends, like Google Drive? Synology Drive. It has a document and spreadsheet editor, totally custom, and probably 70% as good as Google Drive (which is pretty impressive considering you've never heard about it). If you have internet which isn't NAT'ed in a way that blocks hosting a server, it'll work. Generate a public link. Send it. Done.

Synology is awesome. If you thought self-hosting a server was too hard, think again. Anyone can do this. The unit sitting under my TV has an uptime of three years (I do have a UPS that can power it for about an hour or two; this has been used many times). I literally cannot express how little I've touched it in that time. I maintain all of our company's production cloud workloads on AWS, and I'd feel comfortable moving some things to a Synology unit, if you can develop a better story around redundant networking and power (this is the real challenge with self-hosting; not the server itself, not data redundancy, but the pipes supplying it).

[1] https://www.synology.com/en-us/support/RAID_calculator