Early on I had been using Linksations and I have a couple that are more than 10 years old and still running fine. However, I started seeing failures for the newer drives and they used really cheap fans. The drives outlasted the fans. And there was the period after Apple changed to their private version of CIFS/SMB when lots of NAS products "broke". Buffalo stranded many of their users by failing to update the firmware. I switched to the Blackhawk NAS's for a while, but the failure rate was much higher than Linkstation.

Lately, I've been using MyBook for inexpensive NAS's and they've been OK. Synology is a step up.

Since I don't have any proof I won't name names, but I suspect that some of the really inexpensive products are not shy about including refurb drives. I can buy Synology frames and populate with drives of my choice.

While not a solution that I use, lots of high end wireless routers include a USB slot ... for creating an instant NAS.

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For any hard drive, treat it as an already cracked egg -- It is not a case of if the drive will fail, the only uncertain detail is when it will fail. I've had high quality drives fail in the first year and I have some that were part of my 2000 centennial upgrade that are still perking along.