Beginner advice?

[Enquiries]

Hello!

First, kudos for your site and the depth of knowledge you share, it's greatly appreciated.
I'm a beginner looking into nas and though it's hard to follow you at times, your work is incredibly comprehensive.
I am a mac user but comfortable on pc and would like to have a central place to access my image files as well as have storage for music, documents and some video.
Though I'm all for plug n play, I like to customize my setups so I was leaning towards Qnap.

1.) I am a photographer and have about 4tb of images I'd like to back up/rotate on an ongoing basis. These could be backup catalog files or low res image proxies that I can pull/send to clients. Also there will be photoshop work and occasional short video work to be done.
2.) I'm just beginning to study programming and would like to be able to have vm capabilities.
3.) One son - music and some videos on a central server would be useful for my family.
4.) Another son - 10-50gb files for 3D modeling projects for school. Storage and access only.
Beyond that, I'm open.

I was looking at one of the Qnap 3 drive series, primarily because I can almost afford it.
And with the pandemic, it might be awhile...

Any advice would be very much appreciated.
Thanks again!

Steve

[ed]

Qnap TS-328 would have been a good budget choice, but it does not support virtual machines.A model likes TS-251B/51D. TS-453Be would be a minimum requirement.If you do choose a 4-bay, you do not have to start with 4 drives. You can start with 2 or three.Also, PCIe slots are very beneficial for later upgrades. You can add 10GbE os SSD caching cards easily.Qnap s a good choice. Not only you get hardware but also their free apps and support.I hope this helps.