The best bit of advice I could give is know what your purpose is.

I needed a storage device, I could have gotten away with 2 external drives and manual labour but instead I got swayed by a QNAP that was a hybrid entertainment centre, virtualisation, docker etc.

I tinker so the amount of times I had to rebuild that NAS means I couldn't reliably use it for storage.

I bought a WD cloud device which I always kept online. That has the drawback of always being available to tinker with.

I just needed a 2 bay NAS and I need it offline.

That's what I have now. The QNAP sits in its box.