I operate my hard drives totally external to my old PC’s case with a 3D printed holder keeping them together (with a little space between each drive for ventilation). It’s a little ugly, but it lives in a closet so I don’t really care how it looks. More importantly with my old Neatgear NAS I didn’t realize just how much speed I was missing out on. I guess with a modern Synology unit with a SSD cache you’ll likely get similar performance, but it’s so convenient to be able to run Docker containers and VMs on the same machine.
I operate my hard drives totally external to my old PC’s case with a 3D printed holder keeping them together (with a little space between each drive for ventilation). It’s a little ugly, but it lives in a closet so I don’t really care how it looks. More importantly with my old Neatgear NAS I didn’t realize just how much speed I was missing out on. I guess with a modern Synology unit with a SSD cache you’ll likely get similar performance, but it’s so convenient to be able to run Docker containers and VMs on the same machine.