I am currently helping a friend update his tech - his current setup is an older ReadyNAS with four 14TB WD Red drives, but the NAS itself is beginning to show its age, and he's looking for something that is 1) Faster, and 2) Less complicated. Ideally, I'm looking for Direct Attached Storage of some sort, that would let me attach at least 4 drives in a RAID 5 array to be used with MacOS, that would require minimal maintenance or subscription software to use.
I was thinking Drobo, but I see they are no longer around. I looked at OWC's ThunderBay offerings, but it looks like you need a subscription to their SoftRAID Pro to get any meaningful data out of the device, such as potential drive issues, SMART reporting, etc. Apple's RAID manager does RAID 0 or 1, but not 5, from what I am reading. Oyen Digital has two options - one without hardware RAID (but has USB-C), the other has hardware RAID (but is limited to USB-3 and SATA 3Gbs).
What options would you suggest for something for a simple, easy to manage, but still fast and reliable local storage option?