And I've never used a QNAP, but I'm on my second Synology and their drive carriages all use rubber/silicone grommets to isolate drive vibration from the case. It's not silent - five drives of spinning rust will make some noise regardless - but it sits in a closet under my stairs that backs up to my media cabinet and you have to be within a few feet to hear it even in the closet over background noise in the house.
I don't use any of their "personal cloud" stuff that relies on them. It's just a Linux box with some really good features for drive management and package updates. You can set up and maintain any other services you want without using their manager.
The ease with which I could set it up as a destination for Time Machine backups has absolutely saved my bacon on at least one occasion. My iMac drive fell to some strange data corruption and would not boot. I booted to recovery, pointed it at the Synology, and aside from the restore time, I only lost about thirty minutes' work. The drive checked out fine and is still going strong. Eventually it will die, and when it does I'll buy a new Mac and tell it to restore from the Synology. I have double-disk redundancy, so I can lose any two of five drives with no loss of data so long as I can get new drives to my house and striped in before a third fails. That would take about a week, so while it's possible, it's unlikely.
If I were really paranoid about that, I'd put together a group buy for hard drives from different manufacturers, different runs, different retailers, etc., and then swap them around so none of us were using drives that were all from the same manufacturer, factory, and date. But I'm not that paranoid. If I have a drive go bad, and it's one that I have more than one of the same (exact) model, I'll buy enough to replace them all, immediately replace the known-bad one, and then sell/give away the same-series.
I don't use any of their "personal cloud" stuff that relies on them. It's just a Linux box with some really good features for drive management and package updates. You can set up and maintain any other services you want without using their manager.
The ease with which I could set it up as a destination for Time Machine backups has absolutely saved my bacon on at least one occasion. My iMac drive fell to some strange data corruption and would not boot. I booted to recovery, pointed it at the Synology, and aside from the restore time, I only lost about thirty minutes' work. The drive checked out fine and is still going strong. Eventually it will die, and when it does I'll buy a new Mac and tell it to restore from the Synology. I have double-disk redundancy, so I can lose any two of five drives with no loss of data so long as I can get new drives to my house and striped in before a third fails. That would take about a week, so while it's possible, it's unlikely.
If I were really paranoid about that, I'd put together a group buy for hard drives from different manufacturers, different runs, different retailers, etc., and then swap them around so none of us were using drives that were all from the same manufacturer, factory, and date. But I'm not that paranoid. If I have a drive go bad, and it's one that I have more than one of the same (exact) model, I'll buy enough to replace them all, immediately replace the known-bad one, and then sell/give away the same-series.