I had a terrible experience with the Western Digital products[1], and a much better one with Synology. The nice thing about going with product from a vendor, v

I had a terrible experience with the Western Digital products[1], and a much better one with Synology. The nice thing about going with product from a vendor, versus building your own, is that they provide a lot of niceties that aren't easy to maintain yourself. Like... - Whatever crazy tunneling and so forth that they do so that I can access the admin interface over the internet regardless of how brain-dead my home ISP router is. Synology is very good at this. - Mobile apps that make it fairly easy to do stuff like "sync any photos after I take them to the NAS, but only when the phone is on WiFi, and optionally delete it from the phone after the sync is confirmed.". Also worth looking at with Synology is their support for really cheap offsite backup, like Backblaze B2. I was able to set something up to protect against say, a house fire, and be selective about what I was sending, and it's something like $1/month for that peace of mind. [1] For example, it's fairly easy to mostly brick them and the recovery process is having to send hand-crafted/altered ICMP packets to it during boot and hope that coaxes it into a BOOTP mode. They are also quite underpowered and just go unresponsive for minutes at a time. The WD products are awful all around.