NAS
Synology DiskStation DS418
Four-bay NAS — the backup target for the photography work.
The DS418 is the four-bay home NAS from Synology — Realtek processor, gigabit network, the DSM operating system that's made Synology the home-NAS default. Bought as the storage backbone for the photography work — RAW files from the D3500, edited deliverables, archived collections — data that doesn't tolerate sitting on a single drive anywhere.
Four bays is the right count for the use case. Two-bay units force a choice between capacity and redundancy that runs out of room fast once a few years of NEF files accumulate; six-bay and above is overkill for one photographer. Four bays gives both growth and a parity drive without overprovisioning.
The processor is the limit. The DS418 isn't built for Plex transcoding, virtual machine workloads, or the more compute-heavy DSM packages — Synology's higher-end Plus models cover that. For pure storage and backup duties, which is what the role here actually is, the underclassed CPU stays out of the way and lets the network and the disks do the work.