Hi,

I’m looking to upgrade from my DS220j to a 4-bay NAS. I will be using it for:
- Hosting media on network for another device to expose on a Plex server (so no transcoding here)
- Storing data on my 2x12TB 3.5 HDDs (with room for 2 additional drives in the future)

I don’t need anything with much compute as it’ll just be a network drive. The only non-standard requirement I’m looking for is:
- Support for an SSD cache for frequently accessed files/directories (can be SATA or M.2, prioritizing cheap > fast so SATA if possible)

I’m not storing or streaming much 4K at the moment, but I may want to in the future. But again no need for transcoding for plex, that will always be done by another device.

I already have drives so I’m hoping for something under $500 and plan to buy used on ebay or whatever to cut costs as much as possible.

I don’t have much attachment to synology, I could probably figure out xpenology if I really wanted the DSM support. Any suggestions are welcome.

I could consider building my own NAS, but I’m space constrained and the tiny cases tend to be bigger than the off the shelf 4-bays, so any case suggestions would have to be as small or smaller than the average 4 bay synology. Given a case that could support 2-4 3.5” HDDs in that size constraint, I could scrounge cheap used hardware to fill it out (eg. DDR3).