I can hardly see the point for devices like this. If you are tech-savvy enough to host your own NAS locally, you might as well build your own NAS and install whatever user-friendly OS (Unraid, OpenMediaVault as an example) you wish. No vendor-lock in whatsoever that way. If you arent tech savvy enough, then you should probably use cloud storage anyway.
I am very capable of building my own. But the plug and play of it is really nice. I basically popped in some drives and had a share up and running in a couple of hours. The same sort with DIY was do a part picker list build it (1-2 days) and then pop the drives in then figure out how to configure it correctly (another day or so because I do it very rarely). Then at that point yeah for what I use it for they are equivalent. Other than now I get to keep track of the CVE's that syno is doing for me with the occasional patch. Now I could put a stripped linux distro or trunas or something like that and get the same. Possible and ease of use are also a spectrum to weigh against. When you are young you have all the time you need. When you are older you just want to put it together and serve some files and do something else, because I have done this 6 times already.
But there is actually one reason I am going DIY next time. 'uname -a'. They ship with very old kernels. I suspect the other utilities are in the same shape. They have not updated their base system in a long time. I suspect they have basically left all of the amazing changes the kernels have had over the past decade out. They are randomly cherry picking things. Which is fine. But it has to be creating a 'fun' support environment.
Time is money, I would rather buy a NAS these days even though in the past I ran my own FreeBSD ZFS server NAS. Much cheaper use of my time to pay a 2-3x premium on hardware if it means I spend 4 hours on build and 1 hour on admin per year vs 12 hours build, 6 hours admin per year.
Getting a machine and setting it up for local usage as storage accessible over your home network is very different from having to install bunch of duct taped software and hoping it reliably works all the time without fail are two very different things.
I'm a full time dev and even having my home assistant breaking every time I think of upgrading it, is annoyance enough. My home lights and what not are down for two hours and I'm mostly installing HA from scratch and recovering from the backup that I've started to take since the last collapse.
A NAS is a way more critical device and I don't want to lose my data or needing to spend 2 weeks recovering data under an anxiety attack because I hastily did one upgrade.
