20 Best Synology Nas For Plex (2023 Updated)

Best 4-bay NAS on the market! I filled this up with 4 Western Digital Red Plus 8TB and am running RAID5 on it, giving me just under 21TB of disk space. Setup is incredibly easy – basically just plug it in, go through a couple wizard steps, then decide which packages to install based on how you want to use it.

I’m using it for music, videos, and pictures mostly. The software it comes with (made by Synology) is excellent, and focuses on a clear, crisp interface that’s easy to use and understand. I prefer Video Station (free video package from Synology) over Plex for my use cases and an very happy overall with the quality of the device and software for it.

I do wish that the Video Studio supported DTS audio, but if you happen to have something encoded using DTS, it’s very simple (and fast) to convert it to AAC, for example. I use a tool called “Box4” and it has worked flawlessly every time.

You have lots of options for securing the NAS, making it unavailable outside your internal network if you wish, plenty of ways to log what’s going on, and many, many ways to actually use it. Next up for me is to install the “office” suite they have that you can share with whomever you want – this will likely replace my need for Microsoft Office over the long term (and MS Office isn’t cheap – Synology Office is free with the NAS.

) After that, I may delve into hosting Docker containers on the NAS, which pretty much opens up all kinds of new options. As you can tell, I’m very happy with this device. Everything so far has been very enjoyable to use and there are many more things that I’ll continue exploring with it.

Overall – you really can’t go wrong with this NAS. Walmart is doing it a bit of a disservice by not really giving a real product description with all the things it can do and how you could use it.

I was researching different NAS setups for a while and as much as building my own with FreeNAS on it would have been cool, I just wanted an easy maintained solution. The setup was super easy and there are a ton of features/options/applications available for it.

It’s pretty security minded with its own firewall, configurable per user access to applications or folders, and even 2FA! My biggest gripe with it is that there is no means of whole disk encryption, which seems pretty standard to have in 2023.

You can manually encrypt folders and backups (using the free business version), but that’s just not as smooth as whole disk. The mobile apps are also pretty robust and allow for easy backup of files and pictures.

They don’t have it built in to have a two way sync with photos for whateber reason, and the photo backup option is present in several of their apps which is redundant. I ended up setting an auto task (not using photo backup) to sync my DCIM folder using Synology Drive since that supports two way sync.

That means when I delete a picture on my phone, it removes it from the NAS next time it syncs. Drive doesn’t sync in the background automatically for whatever reason, but I have a routine setup to open it each night automatically on my phone.

There are some small downfalls such as what I’ve listed, with the big one being the encryption, but overall it’s still a fantastic setup. Hopefully they integrate that in the future!.

I have built a home server in the past that works perfect. I can store and read files whenever I’d like and the disk just wake up on demand and stays in hibernation during the rest of the time. The problem with that setup is that it lacks data protection (hardware RAID to be specific).

To have some ease of mind on my data(at least I hoped so), I eventually bought this device (DS920+). I always have the impression that Synology has great software support and hoped that the NAS would just fit my simple usage case: import and editing photos.

But I was so wrong. The device just kept on waking up (up to 7 times a day) without apperant reason after setup. I disabled almost every service that I have control (quick connect, SMB, Synology Photo, Synology Drive, DDNS, NTP, SSH.

) and avoid making any changes to the data. But it doesn’t help at all. I opened a ticket with Synology, after over a months of back and forth, uploaded debug logs multiple times, still, the issue is not resolved.

The agent even suggested that I just disable the hibernation feature since they think it better to run 24×7. But they can’t just answer the simple question: what is/are the service(s) that reads/writes our data? And is there any way to disable them.

To be fair, I understand that disk RAID service might require daily task for maintaness so waking up once or even twice a day is acceptable. Just sharing my frustrated experience here, hoping it could help anyone with similar usage case.

I have learned a lot about networking since purchasing the NAS. I bought it originally as a backup for my photos but it has since turned into a media server. If you’re new the NAS game like I was, prepare to go down quite a few rabbit holes.

But it’s a pretty neat device with lots of capabilities. I love all of the software at your disposal. There’s also no shortage of guides out there to help you because Synology is such a king when it comes to thisarea.

As a big lover of movies, I really love the media server stuff. I use the Plex application to “direct play” 4k & regular blu-rays to my Nvidia shield. Be warned. unless you’re playing content within your home network, don’t count on the NAS and it’s CPU to transcode for remote play.

It is very slow and quite frankly inadequate. You’re definitely going to want a dedicated media server running on a computer or something. It can’t even transcode content very efficiently on the LOCAL area network.

Direct play is really the only viable option for today’s level of HD content. (this is where your device reads the file directly from the NAS and play its on your screen without processing any video or audio.

kind of like loading a video on a computer drive. ) Despite that. great product!.

Being my first time using a NAS I didn’t really know what to expect other than it made sense as a choice for my increasing storage needs and because those cloud storage fees do add up. Synology makes the process as simple as possible for first-time users with no previous NAS experience but who want to benefit from having a centralized content hub accessible from any devices on the same network — or even out of it.

My needs are of the type of backing up personal data, streaming video and music at high resolution across all my home devices, and this NAS does it all flawlessly — in fact I have left most of the settings at its defaults for now.

You can leave the settings as they come or you can go as customized and complex as you want. Synology’s installable packages are a huge asset that simplifies the personal cloud experience greatly. This unit comes without any hard drives — those are up to your choice.

Personally I decided to invest right from the start and included two Seagate Ironwolf (NAS-optimized) drives with it, expecting they can handle years of intense usage. You can set these on RAID 0 or 1, depending on whether you prefer as much space as possible or having a backup disk.

The unit is lightweight, rather compact (easily conceivable) and makes little noise if any, other than a beep to announce bootup/restart completion.

Bought this so I could create my own personal cloud storage so I wouldn’t have to pay for Dropbox or Onedrive forever. Works exactly like I thought it did and does the job very well. I’m already finding new uses for it too.

Automatic backups? Check. A place to upload unlimited photos and videos when I’m traveling instead of carrying a dozen memory cards? Check. A central place to store all my research and notes between my computers? Check.

Accessible anywhere in the world? Cool. I didn’t realize how customizable the software is, these are certainly aimed at the tech-savy and seems to have enough features to make an IT department happy.

I wish there was an express mode or a way of hiding all the super advanced options and settings, or a way for me to focus on the most common settings I need to worry about. I would not recommend this for the computer novice.

However, if you’re skilled with network and file sharing stuff then this is a wet dream come true. For Christmas this year I need a t-shirt that says I AM the cloud.

My DS220+ replaced a WD My Cloud Mirror. The DS220+ is more complex to understand and offers a much broader range of services and sophistication than the WD device. The learning curve has been steep; I’ve had this NAS for almost two months and am finally getting comfortable with managing it.

For me, this NAS is primarily a data backup device. (It can do much more using various Synology apps. ) It is far superior to my prior NAS. The Synology Active Backup for Business (ABB) package is impressively fast and efficient.

I backup my Windows 10 C: drive (System) and D: drive (Data). The daily incremental backups of each drive usually take less than two minutes and run while my computer is in use. The backup data is encrypted, compressed, and de-duplicated, all of which reduces backup storage space.

For example, my C: drive containing 354GB is only using 195GB of NAS storage. The restore process is easy to use and backup data can be restored file-by-file, folder-by-folder, or as an entire volume.

The C: drive backup can also be restored as a complete Windows System (with all C: drive partitions) by booting from a USB flash drive. Synology provides an extensive library of reference materials and when you need more information the answer is there.

somewhere. Synology’s nomenclature is unique and understanding their reference documentation structure and language is part of the learning curve. They provide a good level of technical support and it’s easier to contact them rather than search their libraries.

I’ve been generally pleased with the support I’ve received via email. Synology recently upgraded their operating system and other software. Documentation for both the old and new is available and it’s important to be looking in the right place; information for the older software isn’t valid for their current software.

Some of the documentation and how-to videos haven’t been updated and I’ve gone down a rabbit hole a few times with outdated information, especially on Synology and YouTube videos. When looking at reference materials, be sure it is for DSM 7.

1. Overall, I’m very pleased with this NAS. I’m also using it as a DLNA media source and I’ll possibly look into getting the home security camera feature app working next.

I’ve been using this NAS for about 3 weeks now with 2 10TB drives in RAID 1 configuration. So far, I’m generally happy with the purchase. Build/materials: The case gets the job done, but the plastic cover the goes over the drives and is held in place with rubber grommets seems a bit cheap.

The plastic clips on the drive trays also seem a cheap option. However, it works and even these areas of concern have not caused any issues so far. Since I don’t plan to be frequently swapping drives these are minor gripes.

Specifications: The biggest complaint I’ve got so far is the installed 2GB of RAM on this model. If the intended purpose is strictly to use this for file storage and transfer, that’s probably sufficient.

But I wanted to do a bit more (nothing really intense) and quickly found the system using swap space on the drives causing significant performance issues. To add insult to injury, the official Synology branded memory was all insanely overpriced when I looked into an upgrade.

However, I did find a 4GB Samsung module (4GB DDR4 PC4-21300, 2666MHZ, 260 PIN SODIMM, 1. 2V, CL 19) that I purchased for 1/5 the price at the time that has worked flawlessly so far. That cheap upgrade has made the a far more capable little box and transformed me from someone starting to have buyer’s remorse into a delighted user.

Installing the RAM was not difficult, but it was nerve racking picking a module that would be compatible as there are reports of Synology NAS units throwing warnings when using non-Synology modules. Use: General use of the system has been relatively straightforward.

I have a strong computer background and have not had any serious issues. I would expect most tech savvy folks to be able to manage this will little trouble. However, there is the occasional oddity that leads to some frustration.

For example, enabling the virus scanning was easy enough, but trying to manually update the virus definitions does not work – UI doesn’t return an error, but the updating message does not change and nothing happens.

However, scheduling the update to happen on a scheduled basis before the scan works fine. It appears this is due to the scheduled operation running under an account with different privileges than an admin user.

While this isn’t necessarily a big deal, it does result in a little confusion/frustration. Overall I’m satisfied and would buy again if I were to do it over again. I’d just go in with the mindset that the RAM could be a significant bottleneck for some use cases and be prepared to upgrade.

They work very similar to the RS3617RPxs that I am replacing and have a lot of similar features. Be warned though that Synology’s compatible drive list is much different for these. When I moved my Micron 5200 Pro SSDs (Synology compatible) from the RS3617RPxs to the RS3621RPxs they showed up as Critical and Unverified drives.

The RP3621RPxs still works as it should, but it won’t monitor the drives properly. When I checked their compatible drive matrix for the new units, it is mostly Synology drives with 1 or 2 non-Synology branded drives.

One of the best features of the Synology’s was being able to migrate drives from one unit to another without losing any data. I didn’t lose data, but I technically have fewer features now since the new Synology won’t monitor my drives.

Terrible move by Synology. B&H was excellent as always with the order, handling, etc.

This could have been a nice machine. But the new policy of Synology about vendor lock hard drives is unfair. I already own 4 rackstations with 80 hard disks. Using Synology drives instead of Seagate Exos Enterprise drives means to threw up 10 000 $ or more.

Dell plays that sort of limitation more than ten years ago and it was my main reason to move to Synology. Just two years ago, during their annual public show, Synology had close partnership with both Seagate and Western Digital.

Now they rebrand Hitachi drives with a label and a dedicated firmware and add 30% to the list price. For those who have warning messages while using other drives, you can hack a file inside the DSM to remove the locks.

Otherwise, you are not able to monitor temperature, bad sectors and so on. Hope this helps.

– I bought the DS2422+ because Synology supports a migration procedure from an older Synology NAS. You can take your HDDs out of your older Synology NAS and place them in this unit. This is a great feature, but things went down hill from there.

– After putting my HDDs in the DS2422+, the NAS did boot up but I saw these issues: * HDD status shows ‘unverified’ * When creating a storage pool with the migrated HDDs, you get warnings * Storage pools with any unverified HDD would show a danger status and you get warning alerts/emails.

* The DSM software no longer shows drive bad sector count, temp, etc. for my unverified drives – Synology has adopted a highly restrictive new support policy for HDDs – My HDDs that were once supported in another Synology NAS are no longer compatible in my DS2422+.

I have lost functionality. – As of this writing, there are 11 Synology drives and 1 Western Digital drive listed as compatible from the Synology website. The hundreds (thousands) of other NAS drives on the market are unverified or unsupported.

– I contacted Synology support to understand why my HDDs are now unverified and they said one reason is because the NAS cannot update the firmware on the HDDs. Personally, I don’t want my NAS to dig into my HDD.

– Beyond this issue, DS Photo is no longer available on the unit. You have to use Synology Photos. Connecting your smartphone in your own home using your own LAN to the DS2422+ should be easy. I haven’t gotten it to work (DS Photo would connect just fine).

Synology encourages you to use their QuickConnect technology which may route your photos from your mobile to Synology servers back to your NAS to be stored. No thank you. – Synology does not offer hardware repair service for your NAS outside of the 3 year US warranty.

This means if you have a NAS motherboard failure outside 3 years, your NAS is dead.

The following is my experience upgrading my 2019, 8-bay Synology NAS with Seagate EXOS drives to this new 12-bay unit. Starting with the 2021 models, Synology has been aggressively marketing their Synology branded, Toshiba-made HDD drives.

The language on their site says that this NAS works best with Synology drives but is vague on exactly what exactly that means. The HDD compatibility list for this unit shows only a small range of Synology branded drives.

No Seagate, no WD, and not even Toshiba who make Synology drives. Confused, I reached out to both Synology and B&H customer service (see their Q&A answers here) who told me that while Synology recommends their own drives for best performance, my existing drives were supported and would work.

That was good enough for me, so I purchased the unit and it arrived the next day. After a quick migration, I learned that my definition of work and support are much different than Synology’s. As soon as I powered on the unit, I noticed that my System Health was displaying as CRITICAL in a bright red alert.

My NAS sent me an email saying the same. The reason? Your volume is using unverified drives, please replace with verified drives immediately. The list of verified drives? They’re all Synology. Then I went to the Storage Manager to see if there’s anything I can do to return my System Health to Healthy.

This is when I discovered that Storage Manager is now bricked if you’re not using verified drives. No drive alerts, S. M. A. R. T. , bad sector, temperature, serial number-nothing. You will find out you’ve lost a drive only when you lose the drive.

In a RAID array, finding out that you have a bad drive after it’s too late is not working or supported. Personally, I feel that Synology has lost the plot if they are going to lock their NAS units to their own drives but that’s their bed to lie in and I assume they’ll do a quick about-face if the market agrees with me.

However, if this is their new policy they need to own it and be straight with what they tell their customers and distributors. NON-SYNOLOGY DRIVES ARE NOT SUPPORTED BY THIS UNIT: FULL STOP. If you sell me a car and say that it works with all gasoline but the engine sensor stops working and every light on the dashboard turns on if I fill it with anything other than high octane fuel, that car only works with high-octane fuel-even if I’m still able to drive it on the highway.

(As always, B&H was great with both the original shipment and the return. This review should only reflect on Synology and the DS2422+. ).

I purchased the DS1522+ out of sheer frustration with other backup methods. Over the years I have tried quite a few and always have been let down. However, I have been overjoyed with the results of this Synology product so far.

My initial aim was to be able to back up my systems overnight, so it doesn’t interfere with my work during the day. So, I ordered the 10Gb ethernet adapter before I received the NAS. I initiated an install, setup, and backup on the NAS before I got the 10G.

I might not have ordered the 10G if I had known how well it was going to work. More on that below. Setup was extremely easy. I just plunged in without much reading. The only problem I had was when I installed and used the 10gb adapter.

Apparently, part of the login authentication involves the use of the IP address. Once I figured that out, I was able to fix it. I do not seriously recommend the method of plunging right in. But I wanted to see how far I could go.

For my workstation which has 4 file systems and about 9T of data that includes video and Photoshop files. 95% of it is stored on two 7200rpm drives. The rest is on 2 NVMe drives. So here is the backup time for 5 different backups using Active Backup for Business.

1. 14hrs 43min 2. 10min 3. 8 min 4. 4 min 5. 24 min According to Synology, it will never do another full backup. But you can have it consolidate the backups in any manner you wish. After performing 5 backups what does the backup space look like? Volume 1 (btrfs) Protected Devices 3 Data reduction ratio 2.

23x Backed up data size 9. 8TB Space saved by deduplication 5TB Space saved by data compression 358. 7 GB On the Synology Active Backup for Business Agent, you can click Restore Portal button and have access to download any files(s) in the backup.

That would include any version kept. I have tried this, and it works extremely easy and effectively. I have not tried the restore function yet but will soon.

I picked up the 70TB bundle with 14TB drives. These showed up as 12. 7TB. Built a single storage pool with SHR, yielding a ~52. 5TB space. I am breaking this out into multiple purpose built shared folders and so far am only using btrfs.

I have Plex running using the official Plex build for synology intel 64 bit. I also have some backup shares for local machines, one of which is backing time machine on a MacBook Pro. I am super happy with the general function of the device.

It seems quick and responsive, and the ability to run packages greatly increases how awesome things are. I imagined needing to configure LACP to aggregate multiple connections to my network for capacity and speed, and I plan on it, but it is very fast even with a single uplink.

My data migration was flying along quite nicely. One thing i didn’t count on is the unit complained the hard drives included by B&H were not listed on the hardware compatibility list by Synology. I do not yet know how or if this fact impacts anything.

I can see the unit claiming to see the drives SMART status, and everything seems perfectly normal all around. So I suspect this is won’t hurt anything unless it gives synology an out if I have trouble and ask them for help, but I don’t know.

I have lots of pictures, videos and MP3 stored on my 10TB USB external WD drive. However I can use these files on on my widows PC only. Therefore I ordered this DiskStation to share my files on my TV, iPad, phone and my windows computer.

I did not have to change my USB hard drive. I managed to take this hard drive from the USB casing and place it into the DiskStation. It worked very well, but I have to format this drive to make it work on the DiskStation OS.

I connect this NAS drive to a wireless range extender and now I can share the contents on all my devices. I used uninterrupted power supply with this system to avoid data corruption after power outage.

This is a very well reviewed NAS drive and great for a small business to have security of data at a relatively modest price. There are cheaper units but this unit has a good design for growth and some higher end features to ensure that performance is good.

It was very simple to set up (although I would not again set up with the checking of bad sectors option ticked as it took over 7 hours!!!) as far as getting it online as a drive is concerned. After that, the options of software to make it do a lot of things are quite numerous and some guidance or reading of the manuals is needed.

I bought it with the Toshiba N300 drives – audible but not intrusive. Overall, very happy with the purchase.

This is a great little unit. If you’re looking to shift media files off your laptop or desktop and have them available to anybody connected to the network, this makes that process easy. It’s even better if you have a PS4 or similar hooked up to your television.

The same is true for photos or music. You can also backup non-media files. The unit is probably more than a couple of years old, I think the model was released about eight years ago, but seems to be in very good shape.

It can be set up as a RAID (two disks with identical information) for extra backup, but we chose to use the two 1TB drives as bulk storage, effectively one big disk. Importantly, these are devices that are generally meant to be left ‘on’ and accessible 24/7, but the very efficient low-energy-use sleep state means it’s not burning through much electricity when it’s not actively being accessed, which is an advantage for running costs and the environment.

I’ve only been using it for about a week, but I can’t say anything bad about it. I should have bought one sooner.

Originally, I was just after a storage device which offered a) huge storage capacity and b) data protection. The DS420+ offers both in spades. One can configure it so that one (any of the ones installed) drive can fail completely but one still has access to all one’s data (-> RAID 5 or SHR 1).

If one wants even more robustness, one can configure it so that even two drives can fail completely (-> RAID 6 or SHR 2). The Synology-defined SHR configurations allow one even to upgrade drive capacities, without having to upgrade all drives to the same size (in contrast to the RAID modes).

Furthermore, the “btrfs” filesystem (supported by all “+” models), allows one to regularly check for “bit rot” (e. g. , bits that get flipped on the disk) and even have it automatically repaired! Plus, one can create very space-efficient snapshots of backups, etc.

Super easy to unroll a lot of changes, should they turn out to be problematic. All this is great, and there is so much more a NAS like the DS420+ can do, like being a media server for movies/images/songs that one can play on TVs, mobiles, etc.

, as long as the latter connect to the same local network. One can even safely share select folders to people on the internet. There is so much more a NAS can do: too much functionality, too little space to cover it all.

The Synology UI is great and makes working with the NAS a lot of fun. So why is it not a glowing “five stars”? Unfortunately, the fans are noisy. I’ve had the unit for a couple of weeks and the noise did not fade away.

The fans produce a very annoying ticking noise and some constant drone as well (which is not the air flowing, but most likely caused by cheap bearings). In a noisy environment and/or the NAS tucked away somewhere in a cabinet (needs to have some ventilation, though), you might not be annoyed by the fan noise.

However, forget about using this in a quite living room. YouTubers and the noise spec (19. 8 dB(A)) are 100% misleading. This is not a quiet unit and I’m just talking about the fans. Of course running hard drives are expected to make some noise but when they are idle or even in a hibernated state (can be configured) one should not hear the fan noise over them.

Yet one does. N. B. , the fans run all the time at a pretty decent minimum speed, even when the unit is hibernating (since there is no “Silent mode” on this model), so you’ll hear them unless you completely turn off the unit.

Synology support would neither confirm nor deny whether the noise is normal and since there are so many users reporting the same “ticking” noise from the fans, I don’t expect that Synology service would fix it.

It appears the fans chosen have rather cheap bearings so are expected to be noisy. The same fans are used in other Synology models as well and one can find the same user reports about “ticking” and “noisy” fans.

I really like the Synology software and support was quick to answer and generally very helpful (apart from not confirming/denying the fan noise issue), the hardware specs are good enough for me, so I can recommend the DS420+ just as long you are under no illusion that you won’t be hearing it in a quiet room even when it is just hibernating.

If you can place the DS420+ in another room or some (ventilated) cabinet — it will need a cabled connection to your (WiFi-)router or PC, though — then you’ll most likely will be very happy with a DS420+.

Purchased to act as a home video/music/images repository (for streaming to various DLNA players around the house as well as via SMB share) and a backup host. I fitted it out with 4x Seagate 4TB IronWolf NAS drives (HD-36S-SE) and it hasn’t missed a beat.

There isn’t a video output – everything is accessible via a web interface. Out of the box it therefore requires DHCP but you can set it to a static IP after the initial configuration. About the only thing I’ve not been able to set up on it natively is Internet Radio streaming over DLNA (There’s a 3rd-party Serviio app which allows this, but it requires Java and is thus a bit on the bloated side).

Speed-wise, it’s able to utilize the full speed of its Gigabit ethernet port – For larger file transfers I’ve been hitting data transfers of 100 MB (note the capital B) per second consistently even whenever it’s just plugged into a regular BT homehub.

It runs cool and reasonably quiet (you’ll hear the disks spinning rather than the fan) and there’s an option to dim or turn off the front panel LEDs. By default it’ll turn off the disks to save power after 20mins of inactivity.

It’s yet to have any lockups or crashes after several Terabytes of data going to/from it. Honestly the only downside is that the drives load from the rear of the unit – so you need to unscrew the back screw to fit/remove them.

But if you’re not changing disks regularly then that’s a non-issue. Would definitely recommend.

I bought this unit in 2018. It never worked. Trust me, I am plenty computer savvy, been working with computers since I was 16, majored in engineering, took coding. I’ve even built a computer mother-board senior year of college.

Now I am a busy physician. I bought this unit in the hopes of backing up my computers, but the garbage never once worked. I tried emailing and calling Synology. THEY HAVE ABSOLUTELY ZERO CUSTOMER SUPPORT.

I tried asking an IT person at work — no help. I tried asking Geek Squad at Best Buy, and they couldn’t figure it out either. By the time I figured out it was complete garbage, it was already too late to try to return it to B&H.

I ended up wasting over $1600 and months of hassle trying to get this to work. Trust me: don’t be a fool: NEVER, EVER BUY THIS GARBAGE FROM SYNOLOGY.

The DS1821 I initially received failed after less than 10 days of use (it appeared to be a faulty power supply or main board). The RMA process with Synology went smoothly and I had a brand new unit within a few days.

The replacement had been running for a couple weeks now without issue (it was even able to recover all data from the first unit despite the failure happening during an array expansion). As far as connectivity goes, the link aggregation has been great and definitely speeds up access across my network.

I’ve also added a dual port 10GbE adapter to allow even faster transfers to a couple of workstations. Lastly, the visualization features are working well. W With a few virtual machines running, I’m seeing virtually no interruptions to the storage.

Overall, this was a worthwhile purchase and Synology’s support was very responsive.

I like Synology over comparable QNAP models, mainly because Synology supports BtrFS. When I had drives fail, although I still had data loss, at least my DS3617xs was able to tell me exactly which files were affected.

On my QNAP TS-1685, it only let me know which drives were failing, based on SMART data. QNAP typically has better hardware for the price, but for me, stability and resiliency is essential, and why I love Synology products.

My only complaints about the Synology, specific to BtrFS, is that data loss can still occur, despite the marketing hype. Also, the DS3617xs does not support dedicated graphics cards for the virtual machines.

In this regard, QNAP may be a better option for some people, depending on one’s needs. I also highly, highly recommend Seagate IronWolf PRO drives. I originally had their much slower Barracuda desktop drives, and it makes a world of difference.

The extra cost is worth it, and it also pays to stick with supported equipment if you have to speak with technical support. Once you have to speak with technical support, they may go a little wobbly if you’re not using approved hardware.

First time NAS user. When it comes to technology I like to keep things simple, so I was a bit apprehensive about this purchase. Fortunately it turned out to be very straight forward, just put the hard drive inside and plug it into the router, then you’re taken through a simple formatting set-up procedure.

Pretty sure anyone could set this thing up. Interface is easy to navigate although most of the settings are of no interest to me as all I’m using it for is a Plex media server, again very easy to set up and all working perfectly.

Only issue I’m having is actually copying movies across which is very slow for me, but this is more down to my wifi network, so what I’m doing is just plugging a USB stick straight into the back and transfering this way instead.

It’s really quiet and low power, I’ve worked out it’s only costing me £1 a month to have it running 24/7. Overall happy with this purchase and hopefully it will prove to be reliable in the long term.

I bought this second Synology Diskstation as a backup to my first unit of the exact same model. I am impressed by this product and it does not cease to amaze me at every new feature that I discover. I do have some technical IT knowledge, mostly due to the number of years on which I’ve been playing with computer, but had ZERO experience with NAS and this particular Brand, so I started from scratch by reading a lot of articles and watching dozens of Youtube videos (just like everybody else).

In addition to that I read the main features of this model at the Synology Webpage and made several comparisons with the other models. So far, 4. 5 Months into full time use, I had no issues whatsoever and the Synology applications available for free with the unit seem to cover absolutely all basis for me.

Would definitely recommend this one.

Pros: User friendly system. I’m very much used to windows and the format on the Synology makes it very easy to use with the windows style interface. Cons: None currently to think about. Though this is a bare unit so will recommend upgrading the ram to max when you buy it and then try and get the biggest disk for each slot too.

16Tb that would be. As over kill for some it will help the data flow better in the long run. Also buying the Nas rated disk will help too. With cooling and balance in the box.

Pros: It’s so amazing having all my photos and videos finally accessible. 20 years of backing up onto yearly drives now all duplicated onto the NAS to make them accessible. Synology software makes it so easy to navigate it all too – via laptop, mobile, tablet or even Apple TV.

Fantastic Cons: It’s not cheap when you add drives, but I can’t express how many times more valuable it is than the total price paid to easily browse old images and videos.

Pros: I like how the drive bays easily slide in and out compared to previous models where it had to be taken apart to fit a drive in it. I’ve not used both yet but I like the duel network ports. Cons: If you’re buying it for virtual machine capabilities, get a different one as even with the RAM upgrade it it’s not good enough for to run a Windows VM and Homeassistant together for example.

Makes me feel like spending the extra on RAM to max it out at 8gbs was a waste of money.

I upgraded my aging DS413j to this DS418 and I couldn’t be more pleased. Synology are without a doubt the best in class. The box and design is very well thought out and easy to access the drives. I simply took my 4 old HDs, put them in this box, booted up, and it detected that I was migrating and walked me through a couple of questions and I was up and running.

It even did the DSM update from 6. x to 7. x (keeping all my settings as necessary!). I was thrilled as I had forgotten to backup my configs in my excitement and was worried I’d have to put the drives back in the old one and hook it up to the network and power and all that.

Nope! The GUI speed is noticeably faster with this hardware. The old box was very pretty but sluggish and even a bit painful sometimes to use in spite of that. This one feels like a native OS with no lag.

It detected a bunch of my apps needed updating and did that too. Another side-effect that I was hoping for and proved to be true is the speed. I was getting about 300-800 Mbits/sec using IPerf3 (oh, do yourself a favor and install the synocommunity repo too).

With the same exact cable, network, PC, etc. I now get consistently over 900. But wait, there’s more. Plop in that 2nd cable and the magic really happens and I see easily 1. 3 Gbits and even as high as 2 Gbits!!! That bonding is insanity and well worth the upgrade alone.

The Synology Drive is the real reason I wanted (DSM7) and I’m just getting into it. But the TWO backup windows apps are now a single one that is much nicer. Same with the android apps. The old ones felt a bit jenky and amateur looking.

The new ones seem much more polished and intuitive. I researched a bunch before making this decision and despite the ’18 being 4 years old, it is still the solid choice when you compare specs, especially to the DS420.

And if you don’t know, the model numbers simply mean. DS, then #bays (with external, so 9 means you may have 4 here but an eSATA port for the 5 bay extender box), last 2 is the year created (not manufactured), j = home use, value then plus I’d personally advise against any 2 bay, I mean at that point are you even NAS bro? Speaking of, another crazy thing about 4+ bays is if a drive is going SMART bad or I just need more space, I simply power down, pop out ANY of the drives, pop in a new drive, boot up.

give it time and it will automatically do the needful and shuffle the bits/parity/etc across the pool (you can use it during this process BTW and also this process can take DAYS depending on sizes, so don’t panic).

Incredible. Can’t say enough good about Synology NAS.

I purchased this to replace my original Diskstation DS213j. It has moved my NAS experience up a level. I use it mainly as a media server and it works very well using the DSvideo app. The transcoding feature is particularly useful as my TV is aging and doesn’t play all modern formats.

A big shout out for PBTech. The goods arrived even faster than I expected. I have bought a number of goods from PBtech and have always found them to be fast, reliable and quick to respond to questions.

Had some difficulty setting it up in Windows 10, took a few days and lots of searching, but in the end managed to get it to go, Setting up could be made much simpler with working examples and how to get past common recognition errors when setting up the Network to use Windows Explorer.

Mapping the drives was most difficult to set up, seems it’s a universal problem in Windows 10 for NAS devices. Sometimes its device dependent, several Laptops recognized the NAS instantly while desktops were much more difficult to set up.

Overall data transfer is fast at around 100MB for my setup, but still learning how to use effectively. Not set up as RAID that’s next. My setup is 2 off 2GB drives sufficient for now, but in hindsight should have purchased the 4 bay unit for later expansion.

Silent operation, takes a few minutes to boot, have not explored the various software packages that come with as I’m primarily interested as a file server and universal backup unit.

I purchased this Synology NAS to replace an old 1-bay unit I had for several years. My decision was based on the ability to use it not only as a backup device but also as a media server, and to stay within the budget I had to work with.

To my surprise, it plays my media library well with no hesitation. This may be due to that I use the 1080P resolution and may not work well on higher resolutions. The setup was not very clear and the default HDD is a Hybrid mode – sort of a Raid 1 setup except that it uses 1 of the HDD’s as the primary and then the second one is a direct backup – basically like a raid 1 except you can access both HDD’s which I did not want.

A better description would be like writing a file to 1 HDD, then copying it to a second which means that if you have 2 – 2TB HDD’s, you basically only have 1 – 1. 8TB availability for media and files.

I wanted to set it up as a Raid 0 which took some trial and errors to set it up that way. All in all, not a bad unit.

Where to begin ? I wanted a NAS to use as a centralized storage for my movie collection. I’m using Kodi to play all my files and I wanted a centralized database too. I also wanted to be able to access the files stored on my NAS remotely.

Enter the DS718+. I installed two 10 TB WD Red hard drives and configured the unit as a SHR (Synology Hybrid Raid) storage with one disk redundancy for my movies and personnal files. For the database, I’m using Docker to have the latest MariaDB and phpMyAdmin version.

That was fairly easy to setup. For the remote access to my files, I’m mainly using the Synology provided VPN Server package. I can access the shared folders on my NAS, my desktop computer or any network connected devices (router, modem, Raspberry Pi, etc) at home with this solution.

Next step is upgrading the RAM!.

Coming from an old 3TB Seagate GoFlex Home (I know, Finally), this thing was such a breath of fresh air. I purchased this with two IronWolf 4TB drives and configured them as RAID-1. The desktop environment was very easy to navigate.

There is such a variety of applications/services to choose from. I’m running Plex, Docker (empty cuz I’m still trying to figure that out), LDAP Server, and Storage Analyzer, in addition to base apps.

CPU runs around 5% most of the time, RAM at about 30%. 12 days, 9 hours of uptime as of this writing and no hiccups.

Pros: I had my original disk Station for 5 years and it was constantly running without a problem. upgraded to the DS718+ for the power and versatility of a newer model. Able to watch and play my own music and films away from home, with freedom to upload and download files.

all members of the family have their own folder to do the same. Cons: Can’t think of any at this point, But would be good if they had a telephone helpline. As the DS does so much it the manual can be daunting at times.

Updated review. This thing is total garbage. My 8 year old synology nas can serve up movies that this thing cannot. This nas is absolutely not able to serve as a media server disk. Total garbage. ——— I’m a bit of a Synology fanboy but am disappointed with this unit.

Overall it feels chintzy. Specifically the power plug into the unit is horrible. It is not inset into the unit like previous models and feels very susceptible to breakage.

Do not trust your data to synology. My unit died in less than 6 months. Was used solely as a backup. Terrible quality. Will not buy Synology again.

This is applicable to all Synology NAS, not only the DS420j: The Synology DiskStation 7 software running on all Synology NAS is fantastic and a big plus. Synology applications (packages) are mature and extremely well integrated and there is a package for anything you would want to do on a NAS/server.

Synology support is free and second to none. IMO, these are good reasons to buy Synology, regardless of the particular NAS you chose. I bought a DS420j to replace a DS416play now 6 years old. The RD1296 ARM CPU in the DS420j performs noticeably faster than the Celeron in the DS416play.

The DS420j has “only” 1 GB of RAM, but DiskStation 7 runs perfectly fine with generally under 30% RAM utilized. I believe for home users any Synology NAS with 1 GB is fine, companies with dozens of users will want more RAM.

The DS420j achieves network speeds between 90-120 MB/s reading and writing larger files, like videos files. With many small files speed drops down, but that’s common to all NASs. I find it unfortunate the DS420j and other current Synology NAS have only USB 3.

0 and gigabit ethernet, like my 6 year old DS416play. Many NAS from other brands come with USB 3. 1 or 3. 2 and faster ethernet. For transfer or backup of larger amounts of data via network or USB, a technology from 10+ years ago is not ideal.

It is also difficult to understand why the Synology models for home users currently sold are models from 2020 or even 2018. In case you didn’t know, the last two digits of the model number are the year it came out, eg a DS416 is from 2016.

That said, the DiskStation software is updated regular. Be aware, some advanced features (Virtualization, BTRFS file system, transcoding) are not available on the ARM CPU of the DS420j, they require a NAS with a Celeron or other Intel CPU.

This meant for me I was not able take my hard drives out of the DS416play, plug into the DS420j and boot because the drives in the DS416play were formatted for the BTRFS file system. Overall I recommend the DS420j.

This may be the entry-level model 4-bay NAS from Synology and specs may look a little meager on paper, but the performance of the NAS is very good and the DiskStation 7 software is fantastic on any unit.

I got this to replace an old Apple Time Capsule. One thing to keep in mind when choosing disks – if you are going to use a RAID configuration, factor in it will use some space depending upon the RAID level you select.

Example – I have 2 x 4TB drives in a RAID 1 (mirror) configuration, my resulting volume size is 3. 6TB. There are many online calculators that can work it out for you. The fan is pretty quiet but as mine is located in a bedroom I use the scheduling options to shut it down at night and the turn it back on in the morning.

Excellent delivery experience, packaged up appropriately. I found the Synology website very helpful in getting my iMac Time Machine backups setup and working.

My first Sinology NAS was a DS411j fitted with a pair of 3Tb disks in a Raid configuration. After all these years and with the DSM upgrades it has had it was getting slow and frustrating to use at times.

Since I was only using two of the drive bays and the volume was only half full I decided to upgrade to a Cereron based two bay drive. After backing up all my data to another Sinology that I use as a back up (I have six now although two are no longer in use) I was able to swap the two disks into the new NAS and Migrate without any problems.

Good old Synology DSM made the process easy and flawless. What a difference! Blisteringly fast, the NAS was able to reinstall all the Packages really quickly! I can add photos without slowing down the system as it indexes and make thumbnails of them leaving me to get on with other tasks.

Streaming videos to my iPad actually viable without buffering. I dont need a Celeron processor in the three other Synologys that are in use (each for a specialised task) but for my main data storage I would never go back to the J series again.

The Celeron just makes all the difference. In a nutshell, BRILLIANT.

Absolutely love this NAS. I have upgraded from a DS916+ to this, and added and en extra 2 x 8TB HDD’s to the other 4, the migration was seamless with no problems at all. Adding each HDD took 12 hours each so that shows the speed, on my DS916+ it took around 27 hours to add an 8TB HDD.

I use it for streaming content in Plex and storing about 200,000 photos as well as files for my business. It has been installed a few months now and has given zero issues as we now expect from Synology products.

I have installed a Samsung 16Gb stick of DDR4, which it should really have installed as default, 4Gb RAM is a bit bad on such a good unit.