Synology2 Bay DiskStation DS224+ with 2 x HAT3300-4T (Black, Rack Mount, Tabletop, NAS, Desktop, Laptop)

I’m late to the NAS game. Have a small office with a Windows DC/file/print server. Use this mainly for backing that up and uploading those to an S3 bucket for offsite redundancy. Love the ability to have folders shared and accessible anywhere but haven’t used that yet. I bought Synology drives nd they work great, seeing videos now that synology forces you to use their drives, which cost more than comparable drives, or they throw an error in the console. Not sure how true it is, so far I love the interface and it works great for me.

I spent a lot of time researching an upgrade to my old Zyxel NSA320. It's been a really solid performer, but I was switching to use the NAS as my file server, and 2Gb of storage just wasn't adequate. After much reading and watching I settled on the Synology DS224+ with 2 4Tb Synology drives. After receiving the package and doing further research, I decided that 4Tb was too small for what I needed. I purchased 2 Iron Wolf 12Tb drives to put in the NAS instead, and added the Synology 4Tb drives to my computer and my wife's computer as redundancy (yep, I'm paranoid about losing data!). Synology support has been good. During some troubleshooting, I sent logs to them and they saw either the power supply or motherboard in the NAS potentially failing. They proactively, and immediately sent me a new NAS enclosure with an RMA for the old one. So far, the replacement seems solid and the logs I generated show no issues. I also purchased an additional 4Gb of RAM for this to help with heavy usage and, for around $80, I would consider this is strong option for anyone buying this - cheap power-user upgrade.

Bought the 4TB kit and later added Crucial 4G DDR4 SoDIMM memory. Way more features that I expected. Lots of free apps available from the app store that completely mimic ALL of the features that iCl*ud and Go*gle have online. Photos have local AI to help you organize, recognize faces, places, and objects. Also, you can setup the app on your phone to automatically backup every photo you take--just like the cloud services do. It also has ability to download an office suite similar to the cloud services. Word of caution though--use Tailscale VPN and turn off Quick Connect!