Anybody use a network attached storage device or service. I was going to buy Synology but fell down the tech rabbit hole. Unraid seems like the best option for noob home usage. It's the only "pay as you go" solution I found. You can start with 2 HDD and expand later. The professional IT guys rag on it because it's "legacy" RAID4. But not having to buy thousands of dollars worth of HDDs upfront is hard to resist. Synology is plug and play. But there are so many reports of catastrophic hardware failure. Plus the price vs total storage bays don't compare well against Unraid. As near as I can tell FreeNAS is beyond my skill set.
You have a gaming desktop of some kind right? Just use that as a server. Most of these NAS boxes are slow and shitty. They have weak CPUs. They have crappy network cards. The software is trash. They're for laptop users who need mass storage and don't want to have to buy a desktop. Or for offices where IT has cheaped out and doesn't want to buy a real server. I'm guessing this is for pirated movies? Yeah just use your desktop. The CPUs are so shitty in these NAS boxes that trying play back movies over a network will be a stuttery mess. And install Plex if you haven't already. It's better than Kodi. It's the best thing going right now for stealing shit. So easy to use my wife can figure it out and it works with Roku. Install plex server on the desktop and point it at your files. Then install the plex app on the rokus or firetvs or whatever. Plex is even compatible with a lot of smart TVs.
Personally, if you have some old hardware laying around I would use FreeNAS, it isn't that bad to use and it will give you something interesting to do. You can easily set up a ZFS Raid on it to give you some redundancy against drive failure too. Just make sure you have buy 1 extra drive so that you have a hot spare in the system so that if one fails the array doesn't sit in a degraded state until you get a new one as this is when you run the risk of data loss if a second drive fails. Also, make sure you do not buy any shingled hard drives for this project, they will work fine until you need to rebuild the array when things will go south quickly as they will take an age.