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I've been holding off buying a Synology NAS for the same reason: it seems to involve creating an account with them. Is this in the same category or is it not as bad?
I have a Synology NAS, and the account you create with them is separate from the ones you create on the device. They couldn't log into my device. Their account allows for easy integration with their stuff like the dynamic dns or other outside services. I like it because if my internet goes down, I get an email saying they lost connection, which is great for diagnostics.
If I set up my router to block all traffic to them, it would not prevent me from using the device.
This is the reason I have a asustor NAS. Yes, it's not as feature-rich and there are some services they offer that require an account, but nothing is really forced on you.
Synology nas are nice. I will say there’s definitely a nice UI there and they generally work well. But there is a good bit of lock-in and there are some really reasonable roll-your-own hardware and software options these days.
If you want something that just works, doesn’t need to be super configurable and is easiest to set up and manage, get a synology. If you don’t mind putting in some work or if you need to really tweak some stuff, roll your own
I really like my synology DS216j. Pretty much all I use it for is as a file server and storage, mostly because it can't really do much beyond that these days, but it sure does handle that like a champ. I'm not trying to run a business with multiple users on it, just me and the family, which means mostly just me and my projects. It was super easy to set up in my early days of home networking knowing that I wanted a central location for storing my files from different devices and holding my expanding media collection. I think I saw that it had been running for over a year (would have been several years, but we get power outages occasionally and it's not on a UPS) without a restart when I increased my storage, and it's been running without issue since 2017. I'm planning on upgrading to a device that has 4+ drives sometime soon to make expanding and redundancy easier to handle, but it's a hard sell when this one is still chugging along.
I think it helps that I've always had a raspberry pi or other computer do the tasky things, so I never got entrenched in trying to make it do anything other than be a dlna/upnp server for media and shared file jockey for everything else.
With synology, its easy to use but you need an account with them to do a bunch of stuff easily.
However, you can also self host a bunch of stuff, without a synology account, but its easier with.
Personally, I've got a synology and would recommend it. My next has will likely be a beefier synology as I've got a pretty basic one and it struggles to have all the arrs and jellyfin running at once. My next after that would probably be a repurposed PC or laptop or self build. The synology experience will allow me to identify what I actually want to achieve.
If you currently don't use any cloud services, then maybe its not for you. If you do, I'd get the synology with the synology account and reduce my cloud dependency. You don't have to start with perfect. There can be a path that's just gradual incremental improvement.