Home NAS setup - QNAP/Synology or NUC with TrueNAS?

[Baterka]

I am planning to setup an home NAS for my parents, so they can make an backup of their important data from many old external drives they have.

First, I was looking at Synology/QNAP NAS devices. Seems like an QNAP TS233 is a great balance between price and performance for my usecase as I only want the NAS for data storage (two WD Red drives in Raid 1), sync of the data with my home NAS for additional offsite backup and Plex (max 1080p, over home network into smart TV or mobile devices). I completely ditched the Synology, because their hardware seems weak to me in this pric epoint (512MB DDR3 and some very slow CPU).

The price is still not that good compared to e.g. Intel NUC7 with J4001 CPU. Together with 4GB RAM, some small (M2)SSD and USB3.0 dual 3.5" drive bay I get same price as for the pre-built NAS. With TrueNAS I should be able to get same features as with those prebuilds right?

My question is, if it is worth to buy an NUC for +-same price, or just go with the overpriced pre-built NAS solutions which seems to me as a steal for that hardware. I have no problem with installing software myself. Only thing I am conserned about is USB 3.0 speeds and drawbacks of using an USB drive bay. Any negatives there?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id go with the premade nas, esp if its at your parents house. Its. single unit so there can't be any cables unplugged, and the user interface is nice to work with.

 

The cpu perf won't matter for this use as it takes very little cpu and ram to copy files over a network.

 

USB3 won't be a limit on the diy nas as its much faster than a hdd or a gigabit network