1) there exist viable commercial competitors providing approximately equivalent functionality
2) the roll your own solution with, e.g., TrueNAS, also provides equivalent functionality and is about 90% as easy.
I say this as someone who owns and manages three Synology boxes and one more recent TrueNAS box. There was a time when Synology offered something quite better than the alternatives, but that time is no longer.
My newest one (192TB) I bought the hardware pre-assembled and tested from a VAR, installed TrueNAS, and was off to the races. It cost more than buying the individual components would have, but it had zero headache and was cheaper than buying the equivalent amount of storage from Synology.
I looked at all of those and they came nowhere near the convenience and software that Synology provides.
It's literally the "Why would you buy Dropbox when I can glue it together with rsync" level of ignorant comment, completely ignoring how behind most of those solutions like TrueNAS are in time cost.
I find that odd given that I literally run 3 Synologies and one TrueNAS - I've had the Synologies for over a decade and the TrueNAS for about three years now. They've all been great and do everything I want in a nas. Perhaps you are looking for more bells and whistles for something like DVR; I just do NFS + SMB and snapshots and remote backup.
1) there exist viable commercial competitors providing approximately equivalent functionality
2) the roll your own solution with, e.g., TrueNAS, also provides equivalent functionality and is about 90% as easy.
I say this as someone who owns and manages three Synology boxes and one more recent TrueNAS box. There was a time when Synology offered something quite better than the alternatives, but that time is no longer.
My newest one (192TB) I bought the hardware pre-assembled and tested from a VAR, installed TrueNAS, and was off to the races. It cost more than buying the individual components would have, but it had zero headache and was cheaper than buying the equivalent amount of storage from Synology.