Is Drobo still a thing?
I too have an Asustor NAS. I bought it originally just for backup purposes. I am pleased.
It comes with a variety of software, including Pihole, media servers, and Home Assistant. It runs 24-7.
Mike M
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You could also look at Unraid with a old computer.
You can use it with sever gear, but you can also use it with a cheap computer from ebay. The cheap option from ebay is a easy way to start with it. You can probably get started for less them $100 and then add from there.
The nice thing about unraid is you can also run VM's and containers on it if you like.
Jealous. My wife has a PO request form that has to be filed in triplicate, and woe-be-tide the purchase order request that has a typo! 
I'm a long-term Synology user (first Synology NAS 10 years ago in 2012), have never used QNAP or other options, so my only somewhat usable feedback is that I've never had a significant issue w/my Synology NAS in terms of setup, daily use, or emergency recovery in many years. Like all I've had drives fail, replace always worked, I've had to restore backed up files, that worked. That's made me happy.
I have a relatively simple setup, a couple of 2-drive NAS (DS220+, DS218+) w/two 4TB drives in each, 218+ is primarily used as a secondary "belt-and-suspenders" back-up of data on the 220+. Primary use is file storage/sharing for family laptops/computers - they save all data to the NAS (not enforced but strongly encouraged behavior) and I also backup computers/laptops to the Synology via Synology's Active Backup for Business app to catch what they forget to save to the NAS. Also store family pictures, important documents, etc.
The interface/UI is easy enough to use for those who aren't NAS specialists, but you can "go deep" if you want to, its runs Docker, you can setup a mail server, backup your computers, has VPN support, etc.
Still going strong...
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The review below is a reasonable comparison of Synology and QNAP. You can think of it as Synology is to QNAP what Apple is to Android.
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I've got a Drobo 5N2 and a Synology DS1520+ & DX517. I'm actually on my second 5N2 since the first one died out of warranty and the cost of repairing it was not only 80% the cost of a new one, but it was COVID times and they couldn't do the repair for months due to parts shortages. The Drobo does run apps, but is not nearly as capable as the DS1520+, so it's just used for storage.
The DS1520+ runs our Plex server and a dozen or so Docker containers to support that and a few other things. That model has hardware encoding for video so it works well even for 4k content. It runs in dual-redundant mode so while we get a little less than 3x the storage space of the five drives in it, it's virtually bomb-proof and if a drive dies I don't lose sleep waiting for the replacement to arrive from Amazon. The DSM software is fantastic and includes a bunch of capabilities for cloud backup, syncing with local PCs, etc. If you need the storage, security, and capability to run other servers, I don't think it can be beat.
Just to elaborate more about Unraid if you are interested.
It is hardware agnostic. Unraid installs on a USB drive and then uses whatever hardware it is connected to. It isn't dependent on propriety hardware unlike some QNAP or Synology devices. This means you can actually upgrade it easily if you want to or completely change the system. Last year I did a major upgrade on my Unraid home server from a Intel 2400 with 16GB of ram to a AMD Ryzen 5950 with 128GB of ram. Unraid didn't have any issues with it at all.
- Unlike many systems it allows disk of different sizes to be used. This can be good if you have several drives already you would like to use. It woks by using one or 2 drive as a parity check and then the remainder as storage.
- It also has the ability to have multiple cache pools of SSD's or NVMe drives if you want faster performance for different tasks.
- It has a full blown instance of KVM in it so you can run Virtual machines on it easily
- It also includes Docker and has built in management for containers so you can run all kinds of docker containers.
- It has a nice front end ui so that you can see a bunch of aspects of how the machine is running,
- It has fairly cheap licensing to start with and only maxes out around $110 I believe.
- Built in VPN solutions
Hardware RAID solutions are kind of a mixed bag. Think of it like this, they great for repairing the data on a hardrive as long as the rest of the solution works. But If it isn't the disk that fails but the hardware raid controller then you run the risk of loosing all of your data. You likely can't move arrays from one controller to another in most cases. Variations of software RAID are becoming more popular. Unraid is one such solution. TrueNAS based off of something called ZFS is another
Unraid is a hybrid raid approach because 1. the drives use a parity drive to recover in case of a drive failure 2. All drives are also completely readable outside of the raid configuration. Yep you can take a drive from unraid, Put it in another computer and it is fully readable.
Unraid does sacrifice a little bit of performance but has more flexability that way then a traditional raid solution.
Also because Unraid is essentially a Software storage solution on top of BSD then you can also create a ton of tasks and automation over it. If you wanted to create two systems and do backups between them in different locations you can. You simply built the units, setup a Wireguard VPN between the two devices across the internet, then create a backup script that runs regularly to back update between them.
Allot of this depends on what your expectations are for your usage of a NAS. The server I have now started as a Windows Home Server in 2010. Yes that is 12 years ago. As WHS2011 left support and because a security concern I migrated the whole platform to Unraid a few years ago. It was super easy because of how Unraid runs from a USB drive. I then just added WHS as a VM and used configured it's boot drive to boot the VM in Unraid. I use WHS2011 for specific functions and the rest run from Unraid. I have about 18 containers on it of which Node-RED, Influxdb, Grafana, NGINX Proxy, Plex, Motion Eye support my HA environment. If you wanted to run Home Assitant you can in either a VM or Container. You can also run VM's with dedicated graphics easily so at times my Unraid sever is also a gaming computer with a GTX 3050 and a Widows 10 install with 32GB of ram allocated.
The key is you can build it out how you like. One of the big advantages of a built solution like QNAP and Synology is that they will generally be fairly power efficient. My system won't win any awards for low power consumption as it can climb to over 350 Watts with the right combination of thing and it struggles to stay around 90watts at idle . But that is a characteristic of how I built it out. It is very possibly with a conservative built out to be in the 20 and 30 watts. That said some low powered NAS devices that are limited in functionality can manage less then 10 watts idle.
I ran Synology for years. When I upgraded a few years ago I went with a Qnap TVS-951x. I mostly went that route because I run plex, and it has the processing power to transcode. I run a couple VM's and docker containers on it. I've been happy with it.
My only complaint is it's very slow to boot up and shutdown/reboot. But they all are.
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You have to file a purchase order with your wife. I have to remember that one. 
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2nd qnap.. replaced all but one of my drobos with qnap.. .. have 3 now main a backup and a 3rd i transition to mi for my music plex when we goto mich for the summer.
Agreed. Synology is very user friendly. And a proper storage device, but if you need some processing power, they are not the best.
I saw an analogy above comparing to apple/synology and android/qnap. I'd say that's a fair assessment. In user the friendly side, and price for what you get too.
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