I'm at a crossroads with my storage. I've been sitting at 80ish percent on my RS1221+ for some time now. All bays are full with 6x 14TB and 2x 18TB drives. I'd love to stick with Synology because it's compact, doesn't require much to get it running, and there are plenty of how-to's for the things I need to tinker with. My IT knowledge is mid-to-novice. I do fine when there are well-done tutorials, but anything beyond that can get tough for me. On the other hand, Synology is getting expensive and DIY (Unraid?) is seeming more appealing.
My use case is mostly Plex, Arr's, Scrypted, AdGuard, TimeMachine backups for my Mac, and general storage.
I bought 2x 20TB drives over the holidays that I'm approaching the return deadline for.
I'm looking to y'all for advice. I can buy an RX418 expansion unit but that seems janky and inefficient. I can buy one of the 1U Synology NAS's like the RS422+. But that just seems unnecessarily expensive and I'd love to avoid having two NAS's. I can just go ahead and swap two of those 14TB drives out with the 20TB drives and buy myself a year or so to kick this can down the road....
Or I can build my own server and take on Unraid or something similar.
What would you all recommend? Is Unraid user-friendly enough? I've built PC's before and can set up software when there are how-to's online. Will I have trouble setting it up or finding the info I need for the services I use? Is it possible to build a short-depth compact 2U or 3U 8+ bay server for Unraid?
Thanks in advance for any insight!