I just use an old computer full of drives on which I ssh mount. I don't even care setting up samba these days.
Even NAS distros/OSes are usually overkill for home and less than 5 different users. In a typical family context you usually only need one filesystem for each user + 1 shared fs with same RW for everyone.
Exactly - just a Linux box, mounted with SSHFS. To be fair, I have spent some time over the years writing my own scripts for SMART alerts, but the end result is better monitoring and alerting than a NAS would provide.
Even NAS distros/OSes are usually overkill for home and less than 5 different users. In a typical family context you usually only need one filesystem for each user + 1 shared fs with same RW for everyone.