First home NAS setup for Plex and storage

I’m a 20+ year enterprise network IT veteran just getting into NAS for home use due to cutting the cord and falling in love with Plex and tired of buying WD MyCloud enclosures. Along with Plex, I have photos to store and setup an active mobile upload. I will also have to upload and play home videos of my family, so access outside via a good VPN is desired. This may require an upgrade of my two Cisco 2600G switches. I may setup a VM or two for testing, but not a priority. I’m intrigued on setting up aggregated ports now and a 10GBe network (partial to start) in the future. I’m not sure if NVMe SSD would help me or not for my use case. I’ve been looking at the QNAP TS-453Be and Synology DS918+ and DS1019+. I’m open to other suggestions also, but these were newer so longer support expected. I can’t decide which route to go. I like the android like nature QNAP provides and I’m intrigued by the SHR feature Synology has where I can add like drives (I’m still particular that way with NAS) as I can buy them. I watch 4k as much as possible, but most of my library is 1080p H.264 by default. I will be setting up a HDHomerun Connect Quatro for my OTA DVR with Plex to my Roku and mobile devices (TVs, XBox One, Surface Pro 6, Surface Go and Note 8’s). I’m sure I will add more features as I get familiar with it. Lastly I’m stuck between WD Red, Seagate Iron Wolf and HGST all 10TB Drives. My home is presently wired with CAT6A and uses AC WIFI (upgrading to AX this spring). Please help me make a decision I won’t regret. Thank you.

Under $1,000 USD

It is lovely to hear networking veterans now an then- they know their onions.
Indeed, WD Cloud drives are for beginners who do not need anything more then a drive attached to the network.
Plex is quite advanced multimedia organising app and it requires quite a lot of computing power. Qnap 53Be series will be a safer bet because its potential to upgrade to a cache+10g. Also its HDMI connectivity might become handy one day.
SSD cache itself will not improve things massively, but you may enable tiered storage on a Qnap which would improve things quite a lot.
Regard to the HDD media. WD red drives will be the quietest, Seagate little louder and HGST becoming end of life.
I hope this helps.

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