Synology has backtracked on one of its most unpopular decisions in years. After seeing NAS sales plummet in 2025, the company has decided to lift restrictions that forced users to buy its own Synology hard drives.
My recommendation, as someone who has basically no experience with NAS, and only just got into it earlier this year (so take it with a grain of salt); build it yourself.
If you don’t care about power consumption you can pick up an old PC for close to nothing (assuming you don’t already have one just sitting around, wink-wonk) chuck some disks in it and call it a day. If you do care about power consumption, you can look around for a cheapo board with a decent low-power CPU.
I have a small NAS running an Intel N100 chip. It has very low power draw and has barely affected my bill. I’m running Unraid right now, but initially I was just running a headless Debian 12 installation. If you go the fully manual route (as in not TrueNAS or Unraid) it’ll take a little bit of manual labour, but nothing that can’t be achieved as a fun weekend project, and once it’s up and going you’re gucci.
This prebuilt corpo crap doesn’t really offer anything you can’t achieve yourself, except maybe fancy spyware apps for your smartphone.
My recommendation, as someone who has basically no experience with NAS, and only just got into it earlier this year (so take it with a grain of salt); build it yourself.
If you don’t care about power consumption you can pick up an old PC for close to nothing (assuming you don’t already have one just sitting around, wink-wonk) chuck some disks in it and call it a day. If you do care about power consumption, you can look around for a cheapo board with a decent low-power CPU.
I have a small NAS running an Intel N100 chip. It has very low power draw and has barely affected my bill. I’m running Unraid right now, but initially I was just running a headless Debian 12 installation. If you go the fully manual route (as in not TrueNAS or Unraid) it’ll take a little bit of manual labour, but nothing that can’t be achieved as a fun weekend project, and once it’s up and going you’re gucci.
This prebuilt corpo crap doesn’t really offer anything you can’t achieve yourself, except maybe fancy spyware apps for your smartphone.