Has anyone manually setup a NAS or bought one here India? Exploring options to setup one. I have a NUC lying around which could be hooked up.

Built a PC to run Plex, NextCloud, Deluge (Torrent) and other similar stuff. 🙂

Have WD but now planning to switch to Synology. While doing it on a PC is a nice hobby and timepass, best to get readymade solutions from market than tinker and setup manually

I agree, Synology makes the post-setup usage smooth and you can go for years without touching it for maintenance. However, your Plex encode/decode performance entirely depends on how powerful your hardware is, if you stream 4K HDR stuff quite often, then Synology may struggle, whereas a Ryzen APU build (costing same as Synology setup) would give you much better perf with similar idle power draw. Not to mention that it also becomes a full-fledged computer so you can run whatever stuff you want.