[jjav]

> Honestly curious, this is a real-life situation that me and several of my friends have done with Synology NAS.

I guess I don't understand why optimize for the cost of a single drive, above all criteria?

Between this and the other comments, you've mentioned that Synology is over-priced, lower quality, lower performance, proprietary and phones home. Are you really better off vs. building a higher-quality more performant lower-cost ZFS server that's fully open source and has better reliability?

If Synology is higher cost, maybe take that difference in price to buy an extra drive or two?

To me a NAS is all about reliability.

> and I will have one drive redundancy throughout the whole time

Mentioned in the other comment, but that's not a good way of looking at it. What matters is the probability of loss of data while rebuilding the data after one drive has died. The more drives you have in that set, the larger the probability of loss. Your risk is increasing with every drive you add.

[kalleboo]

Synology hardware is overpriced for what it is, but in the home-sized NAS segment, it's still way cheaper than buying drives.

I simply can't afford to buy a whole array upfront. I can just afford to expand it every other year or whatever.

[jjav]

If you're comfortable with the large and ever increasing risk of loss (by adding drives without adding redundancy) then Synology is probably indeed a better match for your use case then ZFS.

I don't really understand why pay for dedicated NAS hardware if reliability isn't priority #1, but that's me.

Personally, for stuff that I care about but not quite that much, I just keep on the SSD on my laptop. It'll very probably be fine but there is risk of loss (same as Synology).

For the things I care deeply about, they go on the ZFS server with tons of redundancy, snapshots and backups. I'd never trust the truly precious data to anything other than ZFS.