I voted DIY - No regrets. Myself (and a lot of others here) run used/surplus enterprise hardware that’s cheap/free. You’re kind of missing an option for that.

My primary NAS is a PowerEdge T620 with 13x 8TB HDDs (8 in the built in drive cages, 5 more in a caddy that fits in the 3x 5.25" bays). The server and the drives were free/surplus, but I bought an upgraded pair of CPUs (E5-2695 v2’s) , 128GB of RAM, and the drive caddy, for probably $200 total. It’s getting a little long in the tooth and I’ll be keeping my eye out for something newer (and less power hungry) during the next round of decommissioning.

This scratches my ‘play with enterprise hardware’ itch and is easier on the wallet upfront, but the power cost is probably more in the long run.

Also, you’ll likely get very different answers in the polls here vs in r/synology or similar. You’re asking homelabbers here, so you’re going to get homelab answers. But that’s okay, because it sounds like you fit in just fine here!

This is a pretty awesome project, and is very well done! I’d love to see more pictures!

It looks like custom PCBs for the blades and the backplane? More details on that would be very interesting.

What all are you running on this system so far, and what software do you have plans to add? Are they running independently or as a cluster?

Summoning u/geerlingguy here, I’m sure he’ll love this project!