Synology 4-Bay DiskStation DS923+ (Diskless)

Came to the 923+ after talking with a few coworkers and poking around at an older 411 for a while. No it’s not the most powerful NAS, but it’s more than powerful enough to store files, receive and sync backups, serve up media to my TVs, and run a few small dockers. I run some more resource intensive dockers on another pc I have setup for virtual machines, docker and home surveillance and automation. Biggest win for me is going from an older Dell rack mount server that sucks down 200+ watts, to this unit that comparatively sips power at 20-50 watts depending on load. I calculated that I’ll pay for this unit in less than 2 years from the power savings alone!The unit is easy to manage, runs quiet and is every bit as quick if not quicker than my old server hardware. By far my favorite thing is that the software is incredibly stable. I rarely have downtime for this NAS with it being on a UPS. I really only have “downtime” when I reboot for updates or need to move the unit or make a power change. All this without having to log in some what regularly to make sure nothing was hung or needed to be updated and babysat.I run two 512gb Samsung NVMe drives as mirrored cache disks and they made a very noticeable difference in the read/write performance as file metadata are stored there and is retrieved much faster than a spinning disk and makes browsing data on the hard disks feel much faster than if accessing directly from the spinning disks. I believe that writes are improved by writing first to the cache drive, but do not have the ability to max out my 2gb link aggregate listed below to get to the max write speeds of the disks that are limited to 100MB/s of the ethernet link.Lastly I do run the network ports in link aggregation to my UniFi switch without issue. I do wish the built-in Ethernet ports were 2.5gb, but having the option for 10gb in the future is nice.Overall incredibly happy with this unit. Will stick with Synology NAS units in the future for all of the reasons I listed above, and recommend them to anyone looking for a NAS.

I purchased the Synology DS224+ NAS primarily as a media server. My requirements were pretty straightforward. I was in the process of transferring and consolidating years of analog and digital multimedia. I was not comfortable with sticking with cloud storage. Unpredictable internet speed demanded local storage for performance. So, I decided to get a networked storage device that was fast and simple to set up and maintain. After considerable research, I settled on Synology's DS224+. I had some experience using Plex on my PC with an external drive, so the built-in Plex Server app was a bonus.The setup of the RAID 1 (other options are available) dual drive (drives purchased separately) was straightforward using the Linux-based DSM 7 operating system. My knowledge of networking is limited, so it took some poking around to figure out how to map a shared folder on the NAS to a lettered drive on my PC. Transferring all of the media files from my PC to the NAS was incredibly fast once the setup was complete. Performance using LAN Plex clients on my PC, Android tablet, Roku, and phone was better than I expected. The DSM 7 OS has a rich set of apps for backing up, taking snapshots, and setting up a cloud-based drive service. Those were very easy to set up on both the NAS side as well as the PC client side.I decided to take it one step further and set up remote access. The DSM 7 NAS OS has options for VPN service. So, I decided to set up the OpenVPN server. This is where things get sticky. Without getting into all of the details, the default VPN configuration makes some minor security compromises, perhaps to accommodate older client configurations. I had to make some tweaks to the configuration and regenerate the security certificate key to get a sold VPN connection with no warnings. So, you may want to have someone handy who knows a bit about VPN setup to help out, or be prepared to do some research! Alternatively, you can connect remotely using Synology's QuickConnect.The setup is straightforward. It may not be entirely as secure as a VPN connection since it relies on Synology's servers, and you can't access other devices on the LAN remotely. All that being said, if you simply want remote access to your NAS, I would recommend using QuickConnect simply based on easy of setup and use.The Plex performance was so good that I decided to ditch my Tablo and purchase an HDHomeRun quad tuner as an add-on to the Plex server. That was super easy to set up. Now, I have an Over The Air DVR setup that integrates with all of my other media. So far, I have found the Plex's performance and reliability to be far superior to the Tablo, especially when accessing it remotely.If you are simply looking for a simple home NAS and media server setup, the Synology DS224+ provides a solid solution at a reasonable price. Add on a multi-channel network tuner and you end up with a setup that will seriously tempt you into cutting the cord on cable and paid streaming services. If you are willing to fiddle around with the setup a bit, you get the added functionality of a secure VPN connection into the NAS and Media Server as well as other devices on your home LAN. Bottom line: The Synology DS224+ is solid winner in the entry level NAS arena.