Just a few words of caution - this doesn't directly compete with synoplogy. It's literally just a NAS box. That said, it's a NAS box at a awesome price / performance / capability point _if_ and only _if_ you are already in the Unifi namespace.
I would say you are almost always better buying this + a mini-pc then a synology at this point, or a Ugreen NAS + TrueNAS if you want to do amost everything a synology can do.
synology doens't even compete with synology anymore because all the new hardware requires locked in synology drives now.
It's creating a void that is getting filled with Ugreen, Minisforum, beelink, Aoostor for invoative platforms from China and classic competitors like Qnap, Asustor, Teramaster, etc for innovation for the small to mid-tier needs. 45drives in the larger spaces for folks wanting to manage things more on their own but have enterprise scale needs. Dell and HP have always competed on the high-end enterprise space and also becoming a better option, even though synology is so easy as an appliance.
Yes. Synology introduced the requirement to use first-party drives earlier this year and it was such an unmitigated disaster for them that they rolled it back just a couple of days ago.
I would say you are almost always better buying this + a mini-pc then a synology at this point, or a Ugreen NAS + TrueNAS if you want to do amost everything a synology can do.