Could be a regional thing but Synology HDDs are around 30% more expensive than 'normal' WD/Seagate/Toshiba that I'm seeing at first glance. Maybe it does make it up for quality and longevity but afaik HDDs are pretty durable if they are maintained well, and I imagine them being in RAID1 should be good enough security measure?
Considering the price of the diskstation itself it's all quickly adding up to a price of a standalone PC so i'm trying to keep it simple since it's for a relatively low performance environment.
Hmm, I bought a used laptop on which I wanted to tinker with linux and docker services, but I kinda wanted to separate the NAS into a separate advice to avoid the "all eggs in one basket" situation (also I can't really connect that many hard drives to it unless I buy some separately charged USB disk hubs or something, if those exist and are any good?)
However I do see the merit in your suggestion considering some of the suggestions here are driving me into temptation to get a $500 NAS and that's even without the drives... that's practically more than what my desktop is worth atm.