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I remember considering the dedicated NAS options when I was doing mine but decided the increased energy costs would be offset by the increased cost of the NAS plus needing another machine for the other tasks.
If it's only idling at 5W over the NAS option then I'm fine with that. I'd definitely like it to be smaller but theoretically the case can fit something like 14 drives if needed.
aggi
This is the problem with self-building a NAS.
One of the biggest costs from an always-on machine is the power, and a CPU with a TDP of 45-65W (in modern CPUs this is the average power consumption under load) and 6 spinning drives... is considerable.
Hence the desire for a CPU with 12-25W TDP, and that can fully hibernate the HDD when they're not used, and can spin fans at a power rating so low that when I tried putting Noctua fans in they didn't work and my power meter showed that Synology are only putting 2v to them in Quiet mode (too low to start a Noctua fan). Reddit people measuring the DS1821+ get it to 20w idle and about 80w fully loaded with 8 x 12TB HDD... larger drives use a fraction more power (they spin faster more of the time), so I'm expected a range from 20-85w for "night time" vs "fully loaded operation".
I could easily self build... but the power usage would never be where I wanted it, I'd have to maintain it, the perf wouldn't be the same (that SSD cache is nice), the physical space requirement is larger (case not as compact), I couldn't afford ECC memory within similar price point, etc.
The big reason to self-build though, ZFS... Synology does not do ZFS. But the RAID5/SHR+ BTRFS combination yields the same benefits and is what their Enterprise class products all do, so I'm OK going down this path.