I have a Synology DS214play and it’s awesome. We picked it up on sale, so it was not too bad <$200. You buy drives separately, which was the more expensive part. It’s useful as home server for storage, I can SFTP from it remotely, run lightweight web apps, and it’s a media server that can send audio/video to the Chromecast hooked to my TV (we got the play model since it transcodes on the fly). It also has a very versatile BitTorrent client built in, not that I would know anything about that…
Obviously not the right time for you, but it’s cool, small, versatile, and has been really painless to use. You can ssh into it too to muck around with Linux if that’s your thing.
