NAS buy advice

I don’t have a NAS and would like to purchase one. I would like to get some advice please, which would be the best NAS to purchase as well as what drives to purchase. Without knowing much I have been hearing that the best brands are Synology and WD RED. I have been watching the space in the last couple of months and noticed that Synology introduced new drives including DS920+. However, I am disappointed with the low-speed ethernet port and the fact that it can’t do Plex hardware transcoding for 4k HDR Atmos x265 10bit movies.
The usage I am planning to do is:
to backup, my macs wirelessly using time machine on a daily basis
backup all my data which includes a media library of more than 6TB
playback of the media library which includes 4k HDR Atmos x265 10bit movies on my 4k LG OLED E9 65in 2019 TV having the 2nd Gen α9 Processor with AI
playback of the same media on older TV devices, macs, phones over the internet when I am abroad
backup and organise nicely all my photos
run software like pi-hole to block ads on TV etc
server features that I might come up down the line
prefer to be at least 4 bay so that I can attach more drives if I need more data

So the question is which NAS to buy and which drives.

For drives, I am inclined to buy a couple of high storage like 12TB and 14TB as they are cheaper per TB, however, I am not entirely sure about Seagate vs WD and Red vs Red Pro drives. I am willing to spend a little bit more if the Pro drives are going to be better and last more, but the concern is how much louder would that be. Also, rpm 7200 vs 5400 would that be any different for me in terms of performance for the described usage? One more thing on the drives, I checked Synology page compatibility list and the WD140EFFX drive is not listed as compatible for DS420+ while DS920+ is still not in the list. I guess that is a typo right, as in I don’t see any reason why the latest WD drive won’t be compatible with the latest Synology NAS.

With all of these tasks running in the background I would suggest something with Dual LAN and multimedia friendly CPU which is also compatible with virtualization/Docker. DS918+ and DS920+ would be a good choice. You can expand it and upgrade it and SSD cache is indeed handy. I would recommend using DLNA or Video Station for video streaming.. Plex is slowing things down, their software is not made to be able to use hardware to its max. You will also get photo organizing features similar or better than Facebook offers (face recognition, GEO, and more).

Best drives are indeed WD, but make sure you get CRM type since SMR is not compatible (it is, but would no last as long/ or cause issues).  Here is a list of CRM/SMR drives: https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/

WD Red will be quite, and speed will be still faster then 1GbE ports at the back of the NAS.

I hope this helps.

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