Synology’s telegraphed moves toward a contained ecosystem and seemingly vertical integration are certain to rankle some of its biggest fans, who likely enjoy doing their own system building, shopping, and assembly for the perfect amount of storage. “Pro-sumers,” homelab enthusiasts, and those with just a lot of stuff to store at home, or in a small business, previously had a good reason to buy one Synology device every so many years, then stick into them whatever drives they happened to have or acquired at their desired prices. Synology’s stated needs for efficient support of drive arrays may be more defensible at the enterprise level, but as it gets closer to the home level, it suggests a different kind of optimization.
The reason why Synology is great is their bulletproof reliability.
Sure you might be able to make a PC perform the same spec for spec but will it actually? And even with these devices, they are so far from Apple it isn’t funny, you have to set up a fair bit still to make the most of them. Also why use a 500w psu VS low power consumption of a NAS device.
Honestly HDDs/SDDs are a disposable part of the backup ecosystem, I get that they want some extra money but there are already scripts to overcome some of the existing compability checkers in these systems.