Obligatory comment every time one of these threads comes up that Synology, sure, the hardware is a bit dated but… as far as set and forget goes:
I’ve run multiple Synology NAS at home, business, etc. and you can literally forget that it’s not someone else’s cloud. It auto updates on Sundays, always comes online again, and you can go for years (in one case, nearly a decade) without even logging into the admin and it just hums along and works.
Synology also has a bit of a software moat with its BTRFS-backed SHR implementation. You can throw in drives of arbitrary size and it'll automatically maximize the available free space. ZFS can't do that, though AnyRaid should make it possible in the future: https://docs.hexos.com/blog/2025-05-22.html
Synology adds some additional logic to automatically recover data from other RAID drives when the BTRFS layer encounters a checksum failure. I don’t think there’s any way to homebrew that part.
I love synology; bought one around 2018, runs nicely until this day; received last DSM 7.3 update so will be supported until 2028 but I will probably keep it running until it dies as I don't expose it to The Evil Internet anyway
does everything and more I need it to (backups, photos, storage, jellyfin, various media servers, torrents etc.)
What makes you think that Synology hardware is special in that sense?
Most quality hardware will easily last decades. I have servers in my homelab from 2012 that are still humming along just fine. Some might need a change of fans, but every other component is built to last.
I started a new job a couple months ago and a week hasn't gone by where I haven't said "For less than we're paying annually for [some software / SaaS], we could buy three Synologys sized to do that thing, at least as good if not significantly better, with a high-availability cluster on-prem plus a remote replica, with no more administration overhead than we have now."
And invariably the conversation turns to hardware specs. SMDH.
I’ve run multiple Synology NAS at home, business, etc. and you can literally forget that it’s not someone else’s cloud. It auto updates on Sundays, always comes online again, and you can go for years (in one case, nearly a decade) without even logging into the admin and it just hums along and works.