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Going into this review, I didn't have much experience with specialised NAS products. All I was planning to do was take two hard drives out of my gaming PC and test how quickly I could copy to and from the NAS.
When I got dropped into the Synology NAS operating system, DiskStation Manager (DSM), for the first time I realised that my imagination was severely limited. There were many more interesting features to test.
Initial setup, Dynamic DNS and Let's Encrypt
Initial setup is dead easy. Installation of 3.5" drives is tool-less. The drive bracket has a catch that you push to release and pull to free from the enclosure. The drive is held snugly in place with rubber feet, and further secured using a plastic strip with three plastic pins that clips into place on the side of the bracket.
When I first booted up the NAS, I was caught off-guard by the fact that I needed to format the drives I wanted to use, though in hindsight it was silly to assume otherwise. It's great that you are warned very clearly that your drives need to be wiped before they can be used.
During the initial configuration, I set the Security Advisor to warn me as if I am using the NAS for work and business use. Aside from helping me make sure I didn't miss a basic security option, it also inadvertently took me on a tour of the full gamut of settings in the DSM Control Panel — from setting the HTTP and HTTPS ports, to setting up TLS with Let's Encrypt for DSM.
Warning that I'm about to format my drive
DSM Security Advisor
DSM Control Panel: Couldn't set my HTTP port to 9000 and my HTTPS port to over 9000 :'(
Storage Manager - This is where the magic happens
Copying to the NAS over the network
To see what speeds I could get on file transfers I ran a few different tests, starting with copying from another computer on the network. Specifically, this was from a Windows box to the NAS over Gigabit Ethernet.
Speeds peaked at over 100MB/s — and that's not just according to the Windows copy dialog, but also DSM and the stats from my MikroTiK router.
Copying from the NAS to PC
Copying files back from the NAS to my PC was just as fast. I saw peak transfer rates of 109MB/s.
Copying to NAS over USB 3.x port
Attaching the mechanical drive I used in the above test to the NAS's USB port using a USB 3.0 to SATA6G converter was faster than copying over the network. Transfer speeds peaked at over 150MB/s.
The drive comes up as a list of partitions called usbshare1-n, where n is a partition number. Interestingly, the drive I attached had a Windows system partition (it would've been usbshare1-3), but it didn't show up in DSM.
File Station with external drive connected via USB
What I liked
When I got dropped into the Synology NAS operating system, DiskStation Manager (DSM), for the first time I realised that my imagination was severely limited. There were many more interesting features to test.
Initial setup, Dynamic DNS and Let's Encrypt
Initial setup is dead easy. Installation of 3.5" drives is tool-less. The drive bracket has a catch that you push to release and pull to free from the enclosure. The drive is held snugly in place with rubber feet, and further secured using a plastic strip with three plastic pins that clips into place on the side of the bracket.
When I first booted up the NAS, I was caught off-guard by the fact that I needed to format the drives I wanted to use, though in hindsight it was silly to assume otherwise. It's great that you are warned very clearly that your drives need to be wiped before they can be used.
During the initial configuration, I set the Security Advisor to warn me as if I am using the NAS for work and business use. Aside from helping me make sure I didn't miss a basic security option, it also inadvertently took me on a tour of the full gamut of settings in the DSM Control Panel — from setting the HTTP and HTTPS ports, to setting up TLS with Let's Encrypt for DSM.
Warning that I'm about to format my drive
DSM Security Advisor
DSM Control Panel: Couldn't set my HTTP port to 9000 and my HTTPS port to over 9000 :'(
Storage Manager - This is where the magic happens
Copying to the NAS over the network
To see what speeds I could get on file transfers I ran a few different tests, starting with copying from another computer on the network. Specifically, this was from a Windows box to the NAS over Gigabit Ethernet.
Speeds peaked at over 100MB/s — and that's not just according to the Windows copy dialog, but also DSM and the stats from my MikroTiK router.
Copying from the NAS to PC
Copying files back from the NAS to my PC was just as fast. I saw peak transfer rates of 109MB/s.
Copying to NAS over USB 3.x port
Attaching the mechanical drive I used in the above test to the NAS's USB port using a USB 3.0 to SATA6G converter was faster than copying over the network. Transfer speeds peaked at over 150MB/s.
The drive comes up as a list of partitions called usbshare1-n, where n is a partition number. Interestingly, the drive I attached had a Windows system partition (it would've been usbshare1-3), but it didn't show up in DSM.
File Station with external drive connected via USB
What I liked
- Tool-less installation of 3.5" drives
- DSM is a pleasure to use
- Setting up dynamic DNS and TLS with Let's Encrypt was dead easy.
- Transfer speeds for large files were excellent — over 800Mbps to and from the NAS.
- The Security Advisor. It let me quickly familiarise myself with the security features of the NAS and provided a handy checklist to make sure I didn't miss any of the basics.
- NAS's are not docking stations! Drives you install must be formatted before you can use them. You are clearly warned about this before DSM initialises — this is just something I, as a NAS neophyte, would want to know so that I know I might need to buy new drives with my NAS.
- The Synology DS220+ power brick accepts a standard kettle plug. It comes with a Schuko plug, but that isn't a big deal since I could use any power cable I had lying around the house.
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