It doesn't even have to be a Pi though, just look at competing NAS solutions that have hit the market since Synology peaked in popularity.
Why am I spending more on a Synology versus something like a UGREEN NAS and just flashing a wide selection of NAS/home cloud operating systems on it? Synology's customer base certainly has the technical know-how to accomplish that.
I've got an RPi 4 with a Samsung 990 EVO Plus 1 TB NVME SSD in an external USB-C enclosure connected to one of the Pi's USB 3.0 ports, and get 280 MB/s.
I would have expected going to an RPi 4 with an NVME SSD not going through USB to do a lot more than just boost storage speed by 80%. I had been thinking of getting an RPi 5 and moving my RPi 4 stuff to the 5, freeing the 4 to replace the 3 that is current running Home Assistant, but for what I'm doing on the 4 I'm no longer sure the 5 would actually give much noticeable performance improvement. It may be better to simply get another 4 to replace the 3.
I guess this is a side note personally don’t think any of the Raspberry Pi hardware is worth it unless you are using the GPIO pins or any of those not-NAS not-PC type of functionality the Pi offers. I think for general compute it’s hard to make it make sense.
I think there are a whole lot of mini PC type of solutions that just make more overall sense.
It doesn't even have to be a Pi though, just look at competing NAS solutions that have hit the market since Synology peaked in popularity.
Why am I spending more on a Synology versus something like a UGREEN NAS and just flashing a wide selection of NAS/home cloud operating systems on it? Synology's customer base certainly has the technical know-how to accomplish that.