alt Hacker NewsHDD have to be bought new, as well as anything mechanical (eg fans). But for motherboards, CPU, RAM and SSD, there is great value in buying used enterprise hardware on ebay. It is generally durable hardware that spent a quiet life in a temperature controlled datacentre, server motherboards from 5 years ago are absolute aircraft carriers in term of PCIe lanes and functionalities. Used enterprise SSDs are probably more durable than a new retail SSD, plus power loss protection and better performance.
The only downside is slightly higher power consumption. But just bought a 32 core 3rd gen Xeon CPU + motherboard, 128GB RAM, it idles at 75w without disks which isn't terrible. And you can build a more powerful NAS for a third of the price of a high end Synology. Unlikely that the additional 20-30w idle power consumption will cost you more than that.
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Maybe 75 W without disk is not terrible but it's not good. My unoptimized ARM servers idle at about 3 or 4 W and add another 1 or 10 W when their SSDs or HDDs are switched on.
75 W probably need active cooling. 4 W do not.
Anyway you can probably do many more things with that 75 W server.
75W idle is 650kWh a year, that's quite significant in the context of a home.
Enterprise hardware is very seldom a good idea.
The hardware has different form factors (19"), two power supplies, very loud, very power hungry.
There are so many good combinations of old and still functional hardware for consumers.
My main pc 6 years ago had a powerful cpu and idle load of 15 watts due to the combination of mainboard and amount of components i had in it (one ram block instead of 2 or so).
And often enough, if you can buy enterpsire hardware, the hardware is so outdated that a current consumer system would beat it without looking at it.
If you then need to replace something, its hard to find or its differennt like the power supply.
The datahoarder community frequently utilizes used hard drives.
That's perfectly fine, if your NAS has redundancy and you can recover from 1 - 2 disk failures, and you're buying the drives from a reputable reseller.
I wouldn't say that being new is an absolute requirement. I recently upgraded my ZFS pool from SATA to SAS HDDs. Since SAS HDDs have much better firmware for early error detection and monitoring, I decided to buy 50% refurbished. Even if I lost half of them, I would still be safe. I also have offsite backups. This setup worked really well for me, and I feel completely confident that my data is safe while not wasting unnecessary resources. Whether to use new or used equipment therefore depends on the setup.