I’ve learned quite a bit about home NAS over the last few weeks. First, Synology is a pain to deal with their hardware limitations, both in terms of old processors and their insistence that we use their storage products. I purchased a Synology DS1825+. It allowed me to populate it with different size drives and it maximizes storage. I used a tolerance for two lost drives (SHR2) with five 24TB and three 18TB drives. Also, the software is pretty bullet proof. It did allow for me to use Seagate IronWolf Pro, but insisted on only Synology Cache M.2, which for two 800GB RAM is pushing $1500. As a note, I did not purchase dual 800GB, but reused my dual 400GB Synology M.2 Cache. There is an optional dual 10Gbe card which can be setup to mimic a single 20Gbe port. I used an 8Bay Ugreen for my main NAS using four 28TB drives in Raid 5. A much faster, more modern unit, but only uses traditional RAID. It comes with dual 10Gbe, which again can mimic a single 20Gbe port. More importantly, it has a much faster processor with GPU and I am able to use the NAS Thunderbolt 4 port to communicate with my MacBook. It took Grok4 and myself a bit of time to make sure that local network did not pass through NordVPN, in other words, so that I could communicate with the Synology and the two NAS could communicate with each other at 10Gbe speed. Lastly, I had to make sure that I communicated with the Ugreen only with the Thunderbolt 4 connection. The final remark is with regards to cost. Storage pricing is no joke. I would have saved many hundreds of dollars if I would have built these NAS even a couple of months earlier.b