I already have two 4-bay consumer Synology NASes. I love them to death but they're both full (4x4TB and 4x3TB).

Before I go out and buy a third 4-bay Synology NAS, I thought I'd swing by here and see if anyone had any thoughts on my storage setup.

My Needs

• I don't necessarily need a single volume rather just lots of raw storage space. This is why I've stuck with 4-bay consumer Synology NASes instead of buying their larger bay products. Based on my calculations, the $/drive is better with the consumer 4-bay products than the 8-bay ones and such.

• My Plex server runs on my i7-4790K desktop so I don't necessarily need my storage solution to have a fast processor. That said I wouldn't mind moving it to a dedicated machine because when 2 or 3 people are streaming off of me, it can suck up quite a lot of CPU which isn't good for when I'm trying to game. If I did that though, the storage box would need a pretty good CPU to be able to keep up.

• I'm not comfortable using CLI Linux so this would need to be a Synology, Windows, or perhaps FreeNAS (never used it but looks good) based build.

In short, should I keep buying 4 bay Synology NASes or should I invest more upfront and build a custom machine with a software (I assume for $) RAID that I can expand upon as I grow?

Thanks in advance and let me know if I can provide any more details about my desires.