Published May 13, 2026, 3:30 PM EDT Richard is the PC Hardware Lead at XDA and has been covering the technology industry for almost two decades. He's been building PCs since young, and when not creating content, you can often find him inside a chassis somewhere. Synology is the default recommendation for many within the network-attached storage (NAS) community and for good reason. The company produces some of the best turnkey NAS products in the business and has the top operating system in the form of DiskStation Manager (DSM). The issue is that, like with other NAS vendors, there's a premium to pay for the luxury in buying a compact system designed in-house with proprietary hardware and software. It's the extra cost to cover R&D, support, and cloud services. If you're looking for a first NAS for beginners, Synology is usually a safe bet to get up and running at home or in a small office setting, providing everyone with a central location to store lots of data.…