Years ago (2015?) I bought a DS416j. Paid maybe $400 at the time. It was the simplest plug-n-play NAS could I could find. I didn't even know it had a GUI! (I was being very lazy with my searching). Two 2tb HDDs. Eventually I started running home assistant (no docker). 2023 I was getting annoyed with performance. Two 2tb SSDs added (4 slots) which helped. 2025 I've moved home assistant to a dedicated $70 thin client.

As a dedicated personal backup for my family it's been perfect. The latest vendor lock in has me reconsidering how I'll upgrade when the time comes. Until this post I was considering a $1000 unit and transferring my SSD drives before buying more storage.

Sounds like it's time to build a proper storage+computer rack.