If you have the money to buy a synology of some sort squared away, here’s how to make something better(?) for a fraction of the price:

Buy a used drive shelf. It’s the part in a server rack with all the drives in it. It plugs into a sas card to move data around and into a network switch to be managed. Get one with all the drive sleds present - $2-3 hundred for one that can take about 24 3.5” drives.

Buy some cheap sff pc. These things are everywhere and they have all you need for a little server. Favor cores over threads, 16gb of ram is more than enough but you can easily add more later. anything in the seventh or eighth generation of intel chips or later is fine. ~$30

If your sff pc has a second Ethernet port, that’s cool! It’s okay if it doesn’t, but if you want the option of a management subnet then you can add one in a half height pcie for almost no money.

Another option is a video card to handle decoding media. When you stream some crap to your tv or set top box or whatever, it needs to be decoded. Most of the time those CPUs are tough enough to do the job but for 4 or 8k media using recent encoding schemes, a half height video card is useful. What’s nice here is media decoding is insanely solved as a problem, so a $50 card will be overkill as long as it natively supports your target formats.

Buy a hba card and the wires to connect it to your drive shelf. You want a half height hba with external connectors that are the same or later in spec than your drive shelf. You can get sas wires that are terminated for 80xx on one end and 86xx on the other end. $50-100 for the card, $20 for the wires.

Plug it all up, put in your drives, install whatever dumb software you wanna use and you’re off to the races with the capacity to use 24 disks for 300-450.

The downside:

You have to have somewhere to put it. You’d need somewhere to put your synology too, but a relatively quietly humming shelf of drives that would look more at home in an industrial environment belongs in the closet, not on the same credenza some people like to put their synology.

You’re actually responsible for it. There are fewer guardrails and if you don’t make backups you can just lose data or end up with a broken system. You’re already using a system you’re responsible for though, so this would just be a bigger better version of what you have that doesn’t go into conniptions like rpi type beats does.

Not what you asked for, but if you’re using Jellyfin only for music, try Navidrome. I used to have the same system as you: Raspberry Pi 4B, 4GB RAM, and Jellyfin was slow and clunky, eating up RAM. Navidrome is a service just for music (no video) and was much faster and responsive on the Pi 4B.

Quick update: I just did a bit of research myself and found out that the RAM in those NASes are not replacible and are soldered onto the motherboard. And for sure i might no longer consider buying one.

I like the Synology DSM’s UI, I know Xpenology exists, but i’d rather not pay for a NAS that will most likely become ewaste in a few years.

I’d recommend looking at building your own with a cheap Ryzen 5600 or something. You can find Nas cases online with racks and everything, and the benefit is you don’t be using some basic CPU. Then you can use some off the shelf NAS OS and you’re done… With the base, but then you’ll have to buy drives just like you would with the Synology.

I’m saying all this as someone on a Synology NAS. My device is barely supported, and the firmware is lacking features for some docker and home assistant stuff, wouldn’t be an issue if i was running a custom setup.

Don’t. I have had many in the past. They are great devices and easy to manage, but with their recent changes, they can no longer be recommended or trusted. I gave all mine away.

You may be interested in unraid as that is also pretty easy to use. You can probably install unraid onto a qnap.

I’ve been a synology user and fan for over 15 years now. Both personally and at work. They used to be powerful-for-the-price, efficient devices with good software. Photos, drive, media server, file storage, and docker containers were the big use cases. They were easy to set up securely for remote connections, and I’ve never seen one fail.

Nowadays though, I’d recommend something else. They have started on the enshittification journey. They removed hardware decoding features, they force you into their hard drives now, the hardware is overpriced, and other diy systems have caught up wrt features and ease of setup. Synology isn’t bad today, it’s just not the only game in town anymore. You can get more for less money with the same amount of effort.

WRT to data collection-I don’t think they collect anything now. But I’m not sure I trust them anymore. It probably won’t stay that way.

I’m also a long time Synology user. Been using their NASes since around 2009.

Buy something else. You don’t want their current-gen hardware. As others have said, they’ve been removing features and hamstringing their own hardware. In a few years, when mine are no longer supported, I plan to buy or build something else.

I looked into ready made NAS machines but wasn’t sold on the software that came with them. Ended up building a small PC and installing OpenMediaVault on it which I have been super happy with.

Depending on how many HDD bays you need you can just buy a refurbished office Dell or HP and it’ll do the job more than adequately.

Whatever you get, don’t get Synology. They’ve been working on penalizing you from using any drives and only allowing you to buy Synology-branded drives by removing features (source)

Do not do this. You will have an easier time upgrading and migrating to a Pi 5 (they can be bought with up to 16GB RAM), and not have to fight bullshit Synology bloatware.

If you’re not concerned about them starting to require that you use Synology-branded hard drives, then :

For most Synology services/apps, we do not collect data on what you store or what you do with your files. We generally only collect statistical data on what packages are installed and which functionality is used. This helps us keep track of what features are important or popular. Purely statistical data is not linked to your account and does not include Personal Identifiable Information (PII). (Source: the other forum)

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I know you are asking about Synology but like the other poster suggested, build your own.

A coffee lake Xeon server like a 2224G uses shockingly little power (15 watts streaming 4k plex), has ECC ram and are available on eBay for ~$200. I bought several used Lenovo Xeon servers a couple of years ago and they have been fantastic.

They have a tos that lets them collect data. There have been some high profile breaches where users didn’t run firmware updates and got their employers wrecked.

You might have a bigger problem than the rpi4 if you can’t decode an mp3. What’s your system like?

I’ve gotten pretty skeptical about the real advantages of NAS for home use. You could get any number of low cost PCs used or new and just jack in some external drives, and you’d be surprised… LVM allows for multivolume “drives” these days, and while I can’t speak to longterm robustness, it is SO much cheaper than a NAS with internal drives, and your network is probably no faster than USB2… In terms of privacy, they’re almost certainly hashing every file you send/receive, if not everything it stores, and possibly nmapping your network for marketing research like how Roombas phone home with your house layout.