I picked DIY with regrets but it does not tell the full story, I guess I now need convenience for my own productivity. For me the cons outweigh the pro’s of a diy system now I have spare money to invest in my lab. When I was broke it was great!

The con’s are scraping a system together and spending precious hours over multiple days configuring it and then maintaining old kit, I am not a storage guy. Every configuration took a lot of time to research and then failures and restarting from scratch and then poor performance that needed investigating.

When I bought a Qnap solution, I was up and running in less than hour including adding the discs.

I have a Rutx12 router that has 2 cellular modems, if the WAN link fails it will route via 2 load balanced 4g connections. It works great in my hack rack and means my lab is completely mobile with no breaks in connectivity