Depending on your use case it might be cheaper to go with something that can fit a spinning hard drive. 1G ethernet is slower than pretty much any modern hard drive, so unless you are planning on doing IOPS heavy workload in it like a database i doubt that it is worth it.
Mostly just laptop backups, music, documents, photos. Not really intended to be a media server or anything so 1GB connection is probably ok.
I got tied of updating and supporting my own home built Linux servers and firewalls years ago. I've been using Synology NAS for a long time now and it just works without having to mess with it much. You can get a small 2 bay for <$200 + disks and it will even run pihole if that's what you want. If you want to learn then doing your own is a good project though
I get a bit excited about learning new stuff but your comment rings true, I really don’t want to add any new significant routine maintenance tasks to my life.
Though I happily brew things up for all sorts of uses, I’m up to ... let’s see ... maybe 10 Synology devices doing things in various roles. Gotta say, have been very useful. Mostly has NAS for VMs and backup dumping grounds, but there’s a solid ecosystem of productivity and networking/security apps.
My goal is low power, no fan noise for the few devices I have in my equipment closet. It seems like every NAS I have ever owned were extremely noisy. The spinning fan and drives just seem like the common weak point. I’m looking at some of the new Samsung SSD drives that claim 750TB read/write reliability. If I run two in raid configuration I doubt I would ever come close to reaching the failure threshold. I would probably disable the fan on drive enclosure.