I kinda hate to agree with the other suggestions here, but entry level and even dedicated NAS products are pretty expensive for providing something you can very easily DIY for significantly cheaper even with the latest hardware.

Was in a similar boat and just ended up taking an old HP desktop and added some cheap HDDs. I ended up playing around with proper Fedora for some LVM cache tricks and running some other services, but the common suggestion for this is SnapRAID and Nextcloud.

If i am to get a new NAS I would get https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/unas-2

Just buy an external SSD and sign up to backblaze. Honestly if all you want is storage and backups there’s not much better or easier.

Why not go truly selfhosted and build your own? Any PC + JBOD + ZFS, then add whichever services you need. NFS or SMB should get you a long way.

Plenty of guides out there on how to achieve this.

Get a old workstation and put some drives in it

You might consider something like the friendly elec CM3588 for a DIY option with openmediavault or freenas. I have a big old box currently with spinning metal, but am looking at this as an option now that there are some larger m.2 drives available.

I’ve had synology, QNAP and a few DIY builds. I can tell you the diy route is better every time. They get a much longer life and lower costs.

If cheap is the most important thing and you don’t need more than 2 drives, consider an odroid HC-4. You can always 3D print a different shell for it if you want too. I made a cylinder Mac Pro shell for a friends dads build.

You can’t rely on mass produced NAS devices because they don’t support their stuff long term. It always blows up. And when the In go wrong in the short term, the support is trash tier. I once had a synology that would crash every time it went to sleep and it would ignore my attempts to sleep off. When I got hold of support, they told me to open the SSH port to the WAN for it and they would get to it in a week or 2. Damn thing was attacked instantly.

Never use an off the shelf NAS.

Beelink ME Mini

Dust off your old PC, put some hard drives into it and install Nextcloud on it.

“NAS” is just an acronym for “Network Attached Storage”. Companies have capitalized on that and will happily sell you a “do everything box”…Until you realize that it’s closed-source, overpriced, and underpowered garbage that will go EOL after a couple years, and might even lock you out of using non-approved drives coughSynologycough

A NAS is literally any computer that is setup to host storage that’s accessible over a network. That’s it. Don’t get suckered into overpriced underpowered crap. Dollar for dollar, literally any PC made in the last decade has more horsepower than a brand new “dedicated NAS”. Hell, a Pentium G4560T (i.e. 6th/7th gen Intel) will run OMV or TrueNAS or whatever without a hitch. Stuff an old ATX case with hard drives, load OMV or TrueNAS or something, and go to town.

An old PC is the best NAS, even if you choose a dedicated NAS box it’s likely that you’ll want to “upgrade” to an old PC in a year or two. Unlike premade NAS boxes you have full control over the software and can modify the hardware as needed. You can undervolt/underclock to save power too, so the main difference is only the physical space it takes. Having the ability to run docker containers and VMs on the same device is incredibly useful, and you’ll get significantly faster transfers despite the drastically lower cost.

Synology. Whatever is in your budget.

Yes, they’ve done things to piss off the community, and sure, a DIY build is going to give you more control and powerful hardware.

But you can get support (though Synology or the Internet communities of users), and if any family member ever needs to take it over, it’ll be easy for them to pick up and manage.

The Beelink mini nas is very similar in stature. It uses NVMe drives, it cannot saturate the NVMe bus but its plenty fast.

You either have

• Easy to use
• Will eventually lose support
• May remain unpatched

or

• Require more maintenance
• You can run the OS of your choice
• It’s your responsibility to ensure it remains patched

I decided I wanted something long-term, and bought a NAS appliance I can boot my own OS onto it, so I went with the Ugreen DXP2800.

I’m running Ubuntu LTS, with Cockpit as the webUI to manage parts of it, and my web services are all running through podman containers (aka quadlets).

There’s a bit of a learning curve, which is the price I was willing to accept.

Have you considered a raspbery pi and an two external SSDs?