I've been using a Synology 4 bay NAS for a number of years now, and have been very happy so far. The software seems very good, and most questions I had were easily answered by internet search.

I would, however, recommend a 4 bay over a 2 bay. With a 2 bay NAS, you are forced to upgrade both drives at the same time to maintain parity/redundancy.

With 3 or more bays and RAID 5 (or Synology's Hybrid Raid) you can start with 2 drives, then add an additional drive when you need to expand (in the future as drives get cheaper). When you fill up all the bays, you can then go back and replace drives one at a time with larger drives (again, as drives drop in price). With 3 or more drives and RAID 5, the drives do not have to be the same size.

For my 4 bay NAS, I started with 2gb + 2gb (already old, from a pre-existing NAS I was upgrading from), then added a 3gb, then a 4gb. When one of the 2gb finally gave up the ghost, I replaced with a 4gb and am continuing to replace with 4gb drives (on sale, $70ish dollars these days for a WD Red Plus).

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Originally posted by r0gue:
What do you guys use for hardware on the open source approach? Any cheapish rack mount options?

Mostly I re-purpose rack-mount chassis that have aged out of their initial function. Rarely, I'll put in a new MB if the CPU is antiquated, replace failed drives, sometimes new NICs or disk controller(s).

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Also, with the Synology approach (or open source for that matter), is it easy to have it do security patching? Realizing that they all are going to have opensource under the hood, I'd like to make sure I don't go to sleep and miss something like Log4j. That said, again,.. I intend to firewall it from the web anyway.

Depends on your definitions of easy.

IME, vendor-supplied patches, and their patch cycles are often late and/or slapdash. There is no substitute for being engaged, aware, and knowledgeable when it comes to security. When you build your own starting with the OS and adding applications as needed, it seems more probable that you will have a more intimate knowledge of the components of the system, and thus be better able to interpret how a security advisory affects you, and thus the urgency of initiating a patch cycle.

Just a quick update. I went with the Synology 2 Bay DS220+ and two WD Red Plus 6TB. This will just be to backup my 2TB MacBook, and probably my wife and kid's MacBook Airs via Time Machine. Mine has about 1.4 used. But theirs are all 1 TB and not very used. So I figure 3 TB will be first image, and from there, it's be just changes over time.

My home surveillance is on my Ubiquity, and I don't do digital media server stuff, as I'm too lazy, so I just stream what I need, which isn't much.

It would have been ideal if Ubiquity had the feature to add a drive to the Dream Machine Pro and do a NAS, but everything I read implied that they're good at what they do, but just barely. So any deviation would be nothing but trouble anyway.