After over two years, I can safely say that I do not regret my purchase.
Nobody is paying me to write about this and there are no referral links in this article.
In The Beginning
Before I went and invested in getting a commercially available Network Attached Storage (NAS) originally I had set up a Raspberry Pi with Open Media Vault to act as my NAS. The DIY aspects of that was more effort than I was willing to put into keeping it up to date and making sure everything was running smoothly, especially considering that the speeds were rather painful at times, but I knew that going in. It was a cheap solution and for a while it worked, sure my Time Machine backups ran overnight, but it was something.
This all changed when the SD card betrayed me and the OS refused to boot, that was the point I went in and researched for an alternative. My criteria was rather basic, it needed to support Time Machine backups and have a “just works” approach out of the box. So the solutions offered by open source products were not considered, although I may consider a DIY approach for a secondary server if the opportunity arises. I looked at offerings from Western Digital, QNAP, and Buffalo as well in my search.
Enlightenment
Eventually, I ended up getting a Synology DS918+ as it offered future expand ability (and boy did that pay off) as well as had an overall positive sentiment from the community. The Disputation Manager (DSM) software that powers the web user interface is extremely easy to use and offers a lot of advanced features if you know where to look. Plus, if you are willing to root around the system runs Linux and offers SSH access.
Setup and configuration was extremely easy and let me setup exactly what I wanted the same day I got it. To start, I purchased two WD Red 4TB drives (WD40EFRX) and put them in RAID 1 for redundancy. The DSM makes this extremely straightforward, which is a real comfort since at that point I was used to having to do everything more-or-less by hand. I was off to the races, pointing my Time Machine backup at the Synology and watching amazed at the speed in comparison to what I was used to.
Onward Exploration
After I got comfortable with the core setup, it was time to explore what things the Synology could do outside of storage. Their plus series allows you to install their virtual machine management software, which provides a simple interface for spinning up virtual machines. I ended up making use of this for a while by running my Unifi Controller on an Ubuntu image for a while.
After some more testing with various packages, I ended up making use of Docker and moved the VM over to Docker, as the interface they have was really nice to use. It was also around this time that I ended up buying another stick of RAM to max out the capacity at 8GB as I would often push the memory with the stock 4GB. The process for upgrade was painless, a recurring theme here. Even when I started to run out of storage space and got another drive, the process to upgrade from 2 to 3 drives and change from RAID 1 to RAID 5 was a few dialogue boxes and letting it do its magic.
Having the ability to let the system take care of all the nitty gritty stuff is really what sold it for me. No longer did I have to worry about what happens if a drive fails, I knew the system would be able to repair itself without me having to stress over it. Even then, the Synology offers a wide variety of tools for cloud backups as a destination for offsite backups. For me, I have most of the files being uploaded to Back blaze B2 as a safety net, just in case something catastrophic were to happen to the Synology.
Finally, I upgraded to adding two 500GB NVME m.2 SSDs (WDS500G3X0C) to serve as a read-write cache and help boost performance. It has been a nice touch, things are a bit snappier and there is less wear being put on the HDDs for everyday operations. The process of setting up the cache was once again super simple and the Synology did all the heavy lifting with setting up the cache and making it part of the volume.