You can’t go wrong with a 2-bay Synology 🤷🏻‍♂️ yes TrueNAS is more “selfhosted”, but the Synology is way easier.

I’ve got an older model WD 4 drive NAS. It works well and is easy to manage. What’s great is how little I need to think about it.

If those were my requirements then I’d be looking at Synology.

Currently using a Windows PC with Stablebit Drive Pool to pool about 10HDDs into one consolidated pool. Nice way to get a stack of storage and to repurpose an old PC I already had, but for a low effort option Synology would be my pick based on all the reports I’ve heard about it being a top notch option. My PC is fine but when things break you need to be able to troubleshoot a Windows setup, which is fine but maybe not for “mum and dad”.

Just pick a NAS from them that does what you need. Whenever I look at them it seems to be about determine how many drives you need and whether you want a high performance one (to run Plex servers and the like) or a low spec one that just does storage and some less intensive stuff.

Applying negative selection, QNAP has a terrible security track record and WD has terrible performance and security track record. So if you want something that’s mostly plug and play, Synology it is, consider a “+” model if there’s any chance that you may expand beyond the simple file sharing use case.

Disclaimer: I currently own three Synology boxes (718+, 220+, 216j) and a QNAP TS-453D running Proxmox (for fun and as an attempt to move towards a HW vendor-independent solution).

I’m running with 2 2 bay Synology ‘j’ models. As the do nothjng more then store data, the js are good enough. When you want to stream of of the NAS units I’d pick more powerful units.

For me, 2 bays was more then enough, as I don’t have that much important data, the 1st is the 215j with 2 2TB disks. They filled up in 5y, so I added a 220j with 4TB disks. Both mirrored and with external USB disk for backup which is 1 TB larger then internal nett storage.

When you need more space then that, more bays and raid 5 is more economical. It depends on storage needs and disk prizes. (Next to budget) It’s good to know you can mirror on a share basis between Synologie nasses. (So you can even think of a multi nas setup)

At work I had a run-in with qnap and couldn’t recover that device easily after power failure, never had that issue with synology, as they use a simple setup that can be accessed in plain Linux as well.

My users interface with my server via plex, smb and Nextcloud.

The guts are pretty complicated but from my users’ point of view it’s pretty simple.

You should think about what services you plan to offer and go from there.

Be aware that none of the off the shelf products have a good reputation for being secure when providing services outside your network which is when you may want stuff like Nextcloud.

Another vote for Synology here. I previously had a DS418play for almost 8 years. Just picked up a DS423+ recently to upgrade and the process was literally as simple as removing the drives from the old NAS, chucking them in the new NAS, and booting up. All my Docker containers, all my credentials, all my licenses were all just there and working, despite being in a new shell.

Regardless of what system you use, your family members will always only have to connect to the shared folders. If they just want to backup and browse files, they won’t have to touch a terminal, ever. That’s the whole point of NAS.

So it’s really a matter of your budget and how much time you’re willing to spend setting it up. For instance, a 5-bay hard drive enclosure and an old 7th gen i3 NUC will do most of what a Synology DS423+ will do and will save youa about US $250. But the synology will take you 2 hours to setup and a few hours of tinkering if you wish whereas the NUC will take many hours of tinkering and setup, depending on your skill level. You’ll also end up with a less polished interface on the NUC setup.

So if you’re the kind of person who loves playing around with custom built system, pickup whatever you like and set it up to your preference. If you just want to get something and have it work, go for Synology.

Oh, and also, Synology shares a lot of data with Synology servers. Mostly it’s not a concern, but if you worry about that kind of thing, you might want to know beforehand.

I recommend a used PC with TrueNAS scale. That way you can actually repair your system and have upgradability. I personally think Synology way over charges for very outdated hardware for the sake of ease, but TrueNAS scale is still better for long term use.

When my old NetGear ReadyNAS Duo (2 bays, SPARC, 100Mb NIC) was reaching its EOL I looked into a purpose built server, a mini of some kind (NUC, etc), or a standard QNAP or Synology NAS. Eventually settled on a Synology DS 920+ (4 bays, x86_64, 1Gb NIC).

It’s been rock solid and amazing value for the 2.5 years I’ve had it. It’s running the majority of my Docker containers, Plex Media Server, a Linux VM, and a few other things. It also has its own shell/CLI, which is useful. I don’t use Synology’s “phone home”/remote access stuff, but Synology Drive and Synology Photos are great - they provide the equivalents of Dropbox and Google Photos respectively, and it works across Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android (via VPN when outside the house). No regrets at all.

It’ll probably never happen because the unemployment rate for autistic people is 85%. But in an ideal world, I’d love to build my own (if there’s any sugar mommies/daddies out there that feel like spoiling someone 🤔):

• Motherboard: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089D34SZT
• Processor: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092L9GF5N/
• RAM: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y4ZZ7LQ/
• Power Supply: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JFLGGQ6/
• SSD (Cache): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09MF8G7KF/
• SSD (OS: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07ZGK3K4V/
• Drives (x4): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09TBF6GHJ/
• Case: https://pcpartpicker.com/product/BWFPxr/fractal-design-case-fdcanode304bll
• Operating System: https://www.truenas.com/truenas-scale/

Just for funsies I just built it in pcpartpicker https://pcpartpicker.com/user/JoshuaACasey/saved/cqjnpg

edit: motherboard seems out-of-stock, so if this ever becomes a reality, might have to make some adjustments for a different micro itx motherboard (plus compatible cpu of course. no biggie, thanks to the existence of pcpartpicker, compatibility is a breeze!)

Since I can’t see any other reference to it, I want to mention I’m using openmediavault and export smb mounts for my windows computers and NFS for Linux. It is running in a VM in proxmox. Works well enough for me. It is my in house backup destination, and my Plex media files storage (plex is running in a container on the same proxmox host).

Like most and probably every other mentioned solution, accessing the nas/shared storage is not more difficult than just opening windows explorer on windows and selecting the network location, etc. I’m sure it is easy on Mac as well, but I don’t use apple products myself.

Simplest I’ve found personally is using an old Pc and getting a PCIE sas/SATA expansion card to allow more drives to be added if you need more than the normal data limit. Use windows server 2019 or 2022. The trial periods for these are 180 days that can be renewed another 5 times which gives a long time before you reinstall the OS. Then you share the folder/drive like normal. It’s simplest because it’s still a GUI and windows.

You can also pool drives so that multiple drives appear like a single drive, this is supported in windows itself (I forget the name in settings) or you can look at something like “drivepool”. I use this to have a “main pool” with a few large drives and then a “backup pool” which is mostly old 1tb or larger drives and use a program like “cobain reflector” to automate a backup of the main pool. Nice thing about “drive pool” is, if the server goes down for any reason, I can still pull each drive out and read whatever is on each drive without having to process them back into a “pool”. The files are just natively visible. Feel free to ask for extra info if anyone is interested.

Synology DS920+ or DS1520+, either one.

You’ll find each step of the process mostly handheld with great guides online for pretty much anything you would ever wanna do with a NAS.

Double check the numbers (I checked these maybe a year and a half ago?) but for 4 bays/drives or less, just get a Synology. Amazing price to performance ratio and synology make a good OS

If you want more than four drives? Do you “love linux”? If so, go with a Truenas or a Ceph build. Do you want it to “just work”? Unraid.

So based on your use case and comments: Just get them a synology. Then either use the Synology Drive Client software, set it up as a smb share/network drive and have them manually copy files in, or go semi-crazy and run Nextcloud.

That said: if the focus is on photos and videos, you may just want to look into google drive or one of the other user oriented cloud services. Fairly inexpensive and, unless you are filming a lot of Those Kind of Movies, the loss of privacy knowing that your birthday pictures will probably be used for an internal training set are offset by having firm backups and one less thing to worry about in an emergency.