The Synology End Game

But self-building a NAS is still a problem, and I'm also talking about this [1] article from the same blog:

There are NO low power NAS boards. I'm talking about something with an ARM CPU, no video, no audio, lots of memory (or SODIMM slot) and 10+ SATA ports.

Sure, anyone can buy a self-powered USB3 hub and add 7 external HDDs to a raspbery, but that level of performance is really really low, not to mention the USB random disconnects. And no, port replicators aren't much better.

[1] https://lowendbox.com/blog/are-you-recyling-old-hardware-for...

There are some new NAS boxes hitting the market (UGreen being one of the brands that are cheaper, but also Minisforum) which have solid hardware but aren't locked down at all. They're just x86 boxes with bog-standard hardware so you can just run whatever OS you want, and they support that use case.