No, that's useful. I'm hesitant to roll my own because the last time I rolled my own I was up a creek without a paddle. I've learned that all-in-one solutions are really good for when you don't want a geometrically-expanding list of things that might have gone wrong... been there, done that. With a completely packaged solution, at least there's tech support of some sort (and often a community) that can provide advice on the whole system, rather than shotgunning piecemeal answers.

My experience with WD is that their drives are great, but the shit they put in front of it isn't exactly Mac friendly. That's one thing that soured me on the EX4.

The Synology has 6 USB ports, 4 network ports and 2 eSATA ports. Whether or not you can dial into them when the host goes tits up I don't know; far as I'm concerned, if the host goes tits up it's time to go shopping anyway.

WTF is up with ZFS, by the way? Seems like all the little NAS boxes want to run it, but OS X, Win and most flavors of Linux don't speak it at all. Thus my adventures in knoppix, which were the opposite of fun and empowering.