I need a advice picking a correct NAS device?

[Enquiries]

Hi, I would like to ask your advice on NAS device. I plan to buy a NAS for my home lab, but I want to know what you would suggest to me buy?

I will have two purposes for NAS
1) use it for VMware vSphere Storages device for VMs. I am home labber, and I like to build all kinds of VMs for learning IT.
2) personal files (it would be nice if it has a thunderbolt connection for mac.)

Because the primary purpose is a home lab, it has to be very flexible and scalable. I want to buy step by step more HDDs in different sizes and create RAID/Storages pools among different HDDs/SSDs/nvme. NIC speed Min. 10Gbe.
Min bay number is 4. 6 or more are better.
Price as cheap as possible. Around 1000EUR. I have to buy drives as well.

Thank you

[ed]

Yes, Synology is a market leader for a good reason. How their software works symbiotically with their hardware.Synology does not allow the NVMe cache to be used as storage. But with reading/write cache this should give a significant boost anyway.In order to take advantage of 10GbE, I would look at Xeon, AMD based models like DS1621+ / 1621xs+.I hope this helps.