I have a Synology DS918+. Older model, but it’s still chugging along and it serves me and my Plex users well. That said, I don’t plan on getting a new one if/when this one dies. They reversed their decision on the vendor lock-in for drives, but the fact they did that at all really put me off.

I get their reasoning behind wanting to vendor lock the drives - Synology is a great chassis for amateur network storage enthusiasts, the kind of people who likely blew their budget on the NAS chassis thinking everything would work fine long-term when they slapped some cheap used desktop hard drives into the box. The shitty drives eventually die, and they blame Synology for their own bad hardware choices. That’s not an issue I struggle with, though, so I’m just thinking I’m no longer Synology’s target customer.

These days I’d recommend just building your own rig if you can swing that. And if you do go with a prebuilt chassis, for fuck’s sake don’t just slap any old hard drives in there!