Another positive vote for Synology here. I’ve had my 12-bay NAS for over 5 years, and its worked largely flawlessly the whole time. Coming from a Unraid server that was a complete PITA to maintain, it was a breathe of fresh air!
The only time I ran into a problem was when I tried to upgrade some drives to larger sizes. I messed up (impatience!) and ended the parity checking on a drive too early, and lost the whole array with no way to bring it back online. Within 24 hours Synology support had logged directly into my NAS (via a temporary password I had to issue them), and sorted the problem for me bringing the array back online and restarting the parity check on the drive - not bad considering it was several years out of warranty!
i5, ZFS array with two disk redundancy. It did mean learning command line linux (google is your friend), but it’s very capable, flexible, and super reliable.
On the other hand, a NUC running ROCK is also really good (I have experimented, but have found recent versions of Roon to be very stable on Ubuntu).
All that said, I share your pain. It’s universal. Good luck.
My cheap NAS that keeps on running - PI3 with 7 USB drives of various size serving up my Video and Music through smb. There are good setup instructions on htpcguides.com. Just a server without backup.
I use a PI3, 16gb memory card, wall wart power supply, usb splitter and your choice of usb drives. Lookup under PI for SMB and follow instructions or download a pre done image. I followed directions to make locations, discover uuid for drives, enter that and mount them. Bit of an exercise but that’s the fun part. My Rock, Nvidia Shield, Plex server and household computers access them by smb.
Most people on this thread don’t understand what a RAID device is. I have been using and setting up millions of $$ worth of RAID devices for decades in enterprises. There are many ways to setup a RAID, and a user should know the basics of it to determine how much raw storage he will need. Some of the more common RAID configurations are: raid0, raid1,raid5, raid10. Raid0 just stripes the data over multiple disk devices, no redundancy. Raid1 mirrors data, so you only get to use 1/2 of the allocated disks. Raid5 uses parity, so if you are using 4 disk drives, your total usable capacity is calculated using 3 drives.
A raid device doesn’t keep multiple copies of data, that is some other program that creates multiple versions of data. A raid takes your data and stripes it over multiple allocated disks, most of the time creating a array that is protected from a disk failure (raid0 their is no protection).
If you have multiple copies of your data or PITs (point in time copies), then that is some type of software that is running from the server. For music, there really is no reason the have multiple version of a song/album, but for critical documents/photos/etc…, there are good reasons to have multiple versions of the data so you can go back in time to retrieve a document before you modified it.
