I'm thinking about buying Synology NAS (Although open to your alternative suggestions. It just looks like Synology hardware have best reviews on Amazon). And want to hook up external hard-drives to it too.
But I'm wondering:
Does the product/interface present an easy way to search through the whole storage with a single query? Does the search also include external hard-drives?
And if it does: How fast is the search? Is it instantaneous or at least virtually-instantaneous? i.e., Does the machine continuously index/update the whole system? Does indexing include external hard-drives too?
Finally: some models don't come with any USB 3.0 slots. How badly does it affect the performance? the speed of file transfer to/from external drives? media server capabilities?