Which Modern NAS?

Yea I don't know.  The NAS landscape seems to be changing very rapidly these days with many many options to choose from.  I'm probably inclined to put a couple new 20TB Ironwolf pro's into my Readynas and float along a couple more years to see what happens.  For basic file service and plex, it's working fine.  Can't run Sonarr unfortunately to truly be self contained media box.  But still that's already 80% of what I actually need out of it.

Trying to spec out just the right DIY build is a bit daunting, especially if I want a lower power small form factor,  I have considered that also.  I actually have a MacPro that will be retired soon, its quite powerful 12 core Xeon system, even though ancient, but the only reason I don't want to turn that into a dedicated NAS duties is that it sucks a lot of electricity (and generates heat).  And it's quite a large case.  There are literally some tiny little NAS $200 devices now that take up to 6 NVMe drives and only use like 15w of power at idle...less then 50w under full load...and are capable of running even win11, any flavor of linux, Truenas, unraid, OMV or whatever you want.  Amazing, as long as you're ok with NVME's for the storage, which there are pros and cons.  

Anyway things are changing, maybe a few more years with the readynas in basic duties is the direction I'll go to see what happens...  For a long time I have thought about moving to Qnap or Synology just because of software compatibility, something which I feel Netgear got completely wrong or didn't evolve to I guess.  Synology made the brain dead decision to sandbox their customers into their own HDD line and people are fleeing that line in droves now, despite its probably the most mature and fully developed NAS line currently out there, with Qnap close second.  Then you have Asustor, ugreen, Terramaster and some others making alternative NAS devices, most of which have just so so software support, sometimes they can boot other OS, sometimes not.  Most of them do have HDMI access to bios and a GPU built in, and are fully capable of booting windows or just about any flavor of Linux, including Truenas, etc..   But sometimes you have to jump through some hoops like boot from a USB stick or something.  Some are better than others.  

If I ever get another NAS I will want to make sure it can do that, in order to support any future use I might envision if their company goes away like the Readynas line did.  Even if I use their OS for the foreseeable future, I want that open ended flexibility.  I don't see any great reason to use truenas instead of say Synology's DSM or Qnap's OS.  Some of the other OS's..maybe yes.  Truenas supports Virtualization, with the right cpu it can be useful.  There is also Proxmox and some people are just running that to handle ZFS and then they virtualize whatever they want on top of that.   Its not as user friendly as TrueNAS but in the end its running linux itself, just like everything else...It might even do BTRFS, I'm not sure.  I don't know the pros and cons of ZFS vs BTRFS either...  I think they are quite similar from what I can see.

I mean there are just so many options now..it's a bit daunting to consider.... that's the point...  Meanwhile I can just load some fresh drives on the readynas and use it for a few more years to see what happens.

But I am definitely watching the NAS space and trying to decide what to do.  The really good ones that are like 6 bays with higher end CPU in them, cost well over $1000 without any drives...so at some point I have to consider whether that is really the right place to spend the money as my data needs are actually not that high...its just that I'm trying to also use the box to host plex and a few other things..most of which don't need anymore cpu then what I already have with the 524X, except these newer ones also support virtualization, which opens up a lot of long term possibilities in the future that the 524X never made it to.