Not the original poster, but to add my experience: Two-bay NAS, two drives as a mirrored pair, two SSDs as mirrored pair cache. Only makes data available on my

Not the original poster, but to add my experience: Two-bay NAS, two drives as a mirrored pair, two SSDs as mirrored pair cache. Only makes data available on my home network. Primarily using Nextcloud and Gitea. It backs up important files nightly to a USB-attached drive, less critical files weekly. I have a weekly backup to a cloud provider for critical files. A sibling comment makes a good point: do you want a hobby or an appliance? Using a commercial NAS makes it closer to an appliance[0]. Building it yourself will likely require more fiddling. If you want to run a different OS on a commercial NAS, dig deeper into the OS requirements before buying a the NAS. Asustor Lockerstor Gen 2 series' fan is not inherently supported by things other than Asustor's software. [0] A commercial NAS will still require monitoring, maintenance, and validation of backups.