The Synology End Game

I ran my own NAS for over two decades in some old 4U I got for cheap, using whatever discarded consumer HW I got for free and I never got the point of Synology. Colleague who has one said it's compact. Well, this year I bought one of those gaming cube cases (with space for 10 drives, what do people do with them in gaming pcs? OK, only 8 spaces are actually drawers with grommets but physically you can fit 10) and retired my 4U.

Seriously, takes an hour to setup your own NAS and you can mix any drives, setup any encryption you want, seedbox etc. I totally understand convenience but this is not a email server you're setting up here, it's just a NAS.

I did something similar years ago. Couple of drives in an old beige tower case. Setup the sharing wand what not. Not exactly 'hard' but it was one thing. Time consuming. Once you have done it a few times the novelty wears off and its more of a chore to mess around with the thing. NAS boxes like that 'just work'. You plug some drives in, set it up, done. However, one comment in here puts it perfectly. The software on syno is wildly out of date. It has been for 15 years. Ease of use is now outweighed by something recent software wise. The syno guys are literally leaving nearm 20-30% perf uplift out. For 'reasons'. Those reasons are wearing very thin. It will mean I need a different backup solution for my computers. One that handles full disk incremental and stored windows and linux on the remote drive and not something I 'run once and awhile' and perferably open source.