My NAS runs NAS4Free. I built it in a Thermaltake Chaser A21 case that I modified to accept two 5-bay SATA hot swap drive carriers (this:
https://www.amazon.com/AMS-DS-356TL-SATA-into-5-25/dp/B00XIL1Q0Q ) and I installed 10 HGST 4 TB NAS drives. I am using an Areca RAID controller, and it is configured RAID6. The motherboard is an Asus M5-87AL-M and originally had a single core athlon that had a second core I was able to unlock, and now has a Phenom-II 955 that got cycled out of my workstation when I upgraded.
I built it originally as a file server, but wound up putting Owncloud (and later, Nextcloud) on it, and this is what motivated the processor upgrade. It has 16 GB of RAM (which is too much; 8 GB would be fine).
It has been up 24/7/365 for over four years now, without incident except when I was hacking on it changing things
. It has become the central component of my work environment and is more important to me than even my workstation.
Including the Areca, which I purchased used, my original build set me back about $700 exclusive of the hard drives. I did pull a coolermaster power supply out of my parts box for it; I had removed it from my workstation because I needed a larger supply in the workstation, and the original RAM also came out of the parts box. Subsequent to that original build, I have put an Intel NIC in because I didn't like the built in realtek, and I have upgraded to 16GB RAM on the mobo and 1GB RAM on the Areca, and the processor change.
I have recently built another NAS4Free NAS. This one is my "go to hell" backup that is remotely located against the possibility of a catastrophe that destroys my systems. It is build on an Asrock J-3455-ITX board, which contains a quad core Celeron. I put it in a Rosewill RS-MI-01 BK case and gave it 2 6TB HGST NAS drives (in a mirror). Total cost of this build was about $650 including the drives. Its performance is acceptable for its intended purpose though it is not within light-years of the performance of my main NAS.
In general, these devices have proven to be as flexible and configurable as I could ever ask for. They are far more secure than a synology and given their FreeBSD heritage they are likely to remain that way. The Nextcloud support is a bit limited; both Owncloud and Nextcloud expect to see Linux as their host and this means that some of the tools (particularly WRT automatic upgrades) don't work. I also have had to do a bit of work on some crons to make them work properly in FreeBSD.
Installation of NAS4Free was quite simple.
So, my own opinion is that if you have the skill necessary to build a computer, building a NAS is a vastly superior option to buying one. You get exactly what you want, you will have better security, and you will be able to reconfigure it as necessary.
