In reply to Martin W:
I've had my Synology 214Play for about four years now. Before that I bought a cheapie from PC World and the saying goes "Buy cheap, pay twice".
The cheapie did it's job until one of the hard drives died. This did not seem like a problem as I'd set up RAID to plan for such an event. However the cheep NAS had unusual hard drives inside it which made sourcing a new hard drive problematic, and potentially expensive because they were so old, rare and strange speeds.
The cheepie (iOmega) did its job but it had its limitations streaming films and other media because it only had 64mb of RAM.
Rather than buy a replacement hard drive, which was about the cost of a new iOmega NAS box, I asked the good people of this parish and was told to look only at QNAP or Synology. I went for Synology and bought two 4TB hard drives to put in it, on a RAID setup which only gave me 4Tb of space to play with. After a few years I needed more space and rather than buy a second NAS box I bought two 8TB hard drives.
I learned several things:
Invest in a good quality NAS box (QNAP or Synology in my humble opinion)
Make sure the NAS box has a powerful processor
Make sure the NAS box has a shit load of RAM (going from 64mb to 1Gb is a revelation)
Get shit loads of storage (I'd say at least four times what you think you need right now)
Make sure the choice of Hard Drives are easy to buy/replace (Western Digital RED are good for NAS boxes)
Buy 50 meters of eithernet cable (It works out cheaper than some 1 meter cables in PC World)
From what I've learned, QNAP is for people that like to tinker with settings. An analogy would be Windows/Android tinkering abilities. Synology is more for those that don't like to tinker with settings an analogy would be Applish lockdown where Synology does most of the decision making for you. NAS networking is way over my head. People do degrees to understand this stuff, so I was happy to let Synology do the hard work.
Synology throw out updates very regularly. Only this week I was advised, by the NAS box to update its operating system. Now that is quality service and belief in your product. Synology really do maintain their apps and operating systems for years. I'm guessing QNAP are just as good.