Are these devices really better than a Samba server on a plain Linux distro? I run one on a retired gaming PC and access it remotely through a Wireguard tunnel. I feel like any proprietary solution is going to be far less elegant or flexible.
IMHO: No. It's just a Linux box. It may be a Linux box with a neat GUI, but it's still a Linux box. It doesn't do anything particularly unique.
I run [almost all of] my home's network services on my present-day desktop rig, which... these days, runs Linux[1].
ZFS with RAID and snapshots? Backups for intermittently-connected stuff like my laptop? Plex and friends? Containers (oh my!)? Desktop stuff? Samba stuff? Yep. And other than GTA:V Online, it seems able to play everything I try in my Steam library with no particular effort on my part.
I don't notice when backups are happening. I don't notice when people are using Plex, and they don't notice when I'm gaming. It performs fine for absolutely everything that gets thrown at it -- concurrently.
I've got an inkling to upgrade the hardware soon. Unlike a "dedicated NAS appliance," I can accomplish this by buying bog-standard ATX hardware and stuffing it into the existing bog-standard ATX case -- just as people in DIY circles did for ~decades before PCs became more appliance-like (and/or fishtank-like).
Once that's done, I may think about doing some 10GbE stuff and turning the old hardware into a more-dedicated NAS. Separating the storage from the applications, in this way, sounds fun. But it won't improve performance -- it'll just be a homelab exercise that I'll live with and learn from (and may elect to reverse).
All those words, just to iterate that I have zero interest in buying a snaky-feeling Synology box. It doesn't give me anything that I want that I'm not already doing.
If your retired gaming PC is doing everything you want, then: Keep doing that (unless/until power consumption or something else becomes a concern).
[1]: For most of a decade before I decided to go back to using a Linux desktop, I still ran Linux -- but always with the desktop portion being Windows running in a VM (with its own dedicated GPU and USB adapter and...). That was fun, too, but I got tired of working primarily with Windows.
Difficult to answer your question. Sounds like you just want a simple network share, so obviously would not be taking advantage of the other features these systems offer.
