Selfhosted

If you want a "setup and forget" type of experience, synology will serve you well, if you can afford it. Of you are more of a tinkerer and see yourself experimenting and upgrading in the future, then I recommend custom built. OMV is a solid OS for a novice, but any Linux distro you fancy most can do the job very well!

I've started my NAS journey with a very humble 1-bay synology. For the last few years I am using a custom built ARM NAS (nanopi m4v2), with 4-bays and running Armbian. All my services run on docker, I have Jellyfin, *arr, bitwarden and several other servicies running very reliably.

Synology is generally a great option if you can afford the premium.

Unraid is a good alternative for the poor man. Check this list of cases to build in. I personally have a Fractal R5 which can support up to 13 HDD slots.

Unraid is generally a better bang for your buck imo. It's got great support from the community.

I have proxmox on bare metal, an HBA card to passthrough to TrueNAS Scale. I've had good luck with this setup.

The HBA card is to passthrough to TrueNAS so it can get direct control of the drives for ZFS. I got mine on eBay.

I'm running proxmox so that I can separate some of my processes (e.g. plex LXC) into a different VM.

Just throwing out an option, not saying it's the best:

If you are comfortable with Linux (or you want to be come intimately familiar with it), then you can just run your favorite distribution. Running a couple of docker containers can be done on anything easily.

What you're losing is usually the simple configuration GUI and some built-in features such as automatic backups. What you gain is absolute control over everything. That tradeoff is definitely not for everyone, but it's what I picked and I'm quite happy with it.

My Synogy NAS was super easy to set up and has been very solid. Very happy with it. I’m sure there’s other solutions though.

TrueNAS Scale is a pretty easy to use option (based on Debian) backed by the excellent ZFS file system.

The most common software choices are TrueNAS and UNRAID.

Depending on your use-case, one is better than the other:

TrueNAS uses ZFS, which is great if you want to be absolutely sure the unreplaceable data on your disks is 100% safe, like your personal photos. UNRAID has a more flexible expansion and more power efficient, but doesn't prevent any bit flip, which is not really an issue if you only store multimedia for streaming.

If you prefer a hardware solution ready to use, Synology and QNAP are great choices so long you remember to use ZFS (QNAP) or BTRFS (Synology) as filesystem.

Do you have any old hardware that doesn't have a job? That is a great place to start. Take some time try out different solutions (proxmox, unraid, casa OS). Then as you nail down your needs you can better pick hardware.

I use UNRAID, I didn’t want to pay for a license originally but having the option to mix and match drives and have redundancy is nice.

I also use the built in docker feature to host most of my services.

I wouldn't recommend a Synology NAS if you intend to stream content with Plex/Jellyfin. It simply lacks the horsepower most of the time. I should just go with a DIY solution, imo. If you just want to through components that you have lying around together, I would go with Unraid. Unraid doesn't really care what you throw at it hardware wise.

A NAS serves data to clients; I know this is tilting conventional wisdom on it's head but hear me out: go for the most inexpensive, lowest power storge-only-NAS that you can tolerate, and instead...put your money into your data transport (network) and into your clients..

As much as possible, simplify your life - move processing out of middle tiers, into client tiers.

I've found CasaOS to be the simplest to set up and get going. I tried TrueNAS for a year, but wish I had started with CasaOS.

I have a qnap. I have had no issues. It runs its own qts OS so no need to figure out what you want to run. Make sure the hardware is x86. Plex runs better on x86.

First I chose a Pi now am using a Nuc as a NAS.
Reason for why: The price was too much for a synology + transcode capable CPU as it wasmt clear what type of processor was being used.

Do people not like TrueNAS?

Unraid is great. Don't let the FOSS heads say otherwise.

I paid $100 3 years ago, ONCE. Best purchase I've ever made.

I've tried the foss alternatives after getting familiar with unraid, and I still prefer unraid.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

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