Synology 4-Bay DiskStation DS923+ (Diskless)

First of all, let me start by saying, a RAID is NOT a backup in itself, as RAIDs can also fail, corrupting some or all of the data. This can happen at anytime, in year 10 or year 1 and depend on the hardware, which are a combination of the RAID device (NAS, DAS, etc...), de storage medium (Hard Drive, SSD, etc...), power supply, etc.... However the chances of that happening all at once are less than having no RAID at all. My advice, if you are able, is to constantly replace the olders/smallest drive in your (RAID) array with a newer one. Similarly to changing (pairs of) your road tires on your vehicle, before even 1 shows signs of failure or fails at all. Drives in these devices can get into a sleep mode, but are otherwise constantly on and or running/spinning and thus wearing out. Above is basic knowledge for storage and not just Synology. While there are drives and devices (and cars) that can reach a 20year lifetime, certainly not all can or will. There is a "3-2-1 Rule" for data storage/backup out there, which is: - There should be 3 copies of data - On 2 different media - With 1 copy being off-site (aka at different location) As for the purchase of this device, Synology DS 723+, I'm very satisfied with the performance and features. The price reflects that also, even for home use. My previous NAS/RAID devices are a Buffalo Linkstation (2 drive) and a Drobo 5N (5 drive), both are around 10 years old and an 8 drive Drobo at work, still in use. The 5 bay Drobo for it's time had a nice feature of being able to use all (or most of) the usable space when using drives of different sizes, and also being able to swap out any drive out for any other drive (smaller or larger) and the Drobo device would take care of it ALL (called BeyondRaid). No messing with pools or volumes. You only have to make a folder share. For it's time, this was VERY sophisticated and worth the investment then. Even today with Synology you have to specify manually if and how you want to add a drive to a storage pool, and how you want a volume on one of these pools, and then define your shares. For the home user, you'll need some basic knowledge or just read the manual of course if you have not done this ever before. It's just not as straight forward as with a Drobo. However this is not a bad thing in itself, as you may want to configure this Synology device for different uses and keep multiple volumes on different storage pools for different uses etc... I consider this a Pro, but it will require some more knowledge of the workings of this device. It has many other features and plugins (apps) which I will not go into in this review, but again there is a use for each and every one of them for a specific use(r), depending on your needs. Synology now also has a RAID mode capable of using drives of different sizes, they call it SHR (Synology Hybrid Raid) and works similar to Drobo BeyondRAID. Hardware wise, it has 2x Gigabit ports, which can be used individually, as a fallback or bonded. Some other brands have 10Gigabit networking built in, with this particular Synology it is an optional plug-in upgrade at $110 at the time of writing this. I don't have a 10Gigabit network at home at this time, but I will be upgrading down the road, I think. There are also 2 NVME slots which you can utilize for cache (and storage) and you can also upgrade the RAM (memory) if you plan on using more apps (plugins). For basic nas use, this is not required. 1 con for me is the flimsy plastic of the device and the trays. It might be fine for you, and even if made from titanium would not affect the performance of this device at all. However coming from Buffalo (Metal + plastic) and Drobo (full metal), this is a step down. This is also true with the very flimsy plastic disk trays and clips.......... (Drobo uses a trayless design, you just pop in the drives like a VHS cassette in a VCR !). Other bonus features new to me also are the web interface, which is quite snappy. There are also apps/plugins for remote login etc, you can enable this if you want it. I'm still figuring out many of these. All in all I'm satisfied with my purchase so far and will update this review down the road. Purchased in october of 2023.

I have 4 Synology DS Series NAS Servers for both home and work purposes. I use them for standard file servers, VPN servers, Plex Media Servers, and backup servers. The suite of tools for Synology DSM is impressive and covers all I need without having to purchase 3rd party software. Knowing all my data is safe with the raid array allowing for disc failures is worth the price alone. I have had to rebuild/restore several computers and have not lost a single byte of data. Speed of transfer has been great, even while the DS is under a heavy load. Streaming 4k video has not been a problem to multiple displays simultaneously. I keep these in dedicated spaces so noise is not a consideration for me. I will say that these are very quiet even under load. The build quality is very good and I love the way the discs can be hot swapped without issue. I did have a disc failure on one of my servers. I provided another disc of the same capacity, clicked replace and the system rebuilt the RAID with the new disc. Very easy and did not require any downtime. For me, the price, ease of use, DSM operating system and suite of tools provided puts Synology above all other NAS servers I have used.

Hi Everyone, I have had mine for a few weeks now and I consider myself somewhat of a heavy user and this seems to hold up very well, I work with photography and I moved roughly 40000 images over to the NAS and I have Synology Moments app running and the AI facial recognition is simply amazing and really help me find some order to my life :) I must say the NAS did work hard to catalog all those pictures and the CPU was averaging around 99%. Even though with the high CPU usage I was login and use the system, for the other users that I have created they didn't really notice the overhead on the CPU during this time ( Which took around 2 days for the AI to do it's thing) However I also have the 220J and when I tried adding that number of images, we had to wait for the cataloging to complete before I could do anything. Being able to access my files and photos remotely thanks to Synology's quickconnect/Drive options is simply fantastic, This is also a great option to create backups for your phone/laptop whether you are away or at home for the whole family or colleges. Synology has a great SHR Raid, (Synology Hybrid RAID), thanks to this RAID I was able to expanded my volume without having to rebuild the array and still have 1 drive fault tolerance and zero down time! I haven't had any trouble with mine thus far, it was really easy to setup and connect, it was as simple as going to a find.synology.com from your PC/laptop which is on the same network and either create a synology account or sign into an existing account. I will be looking at the Synology 420+ in the future and setting up a remote/ off site backup and open a lot more possibilities. ( I'll circle back here in a few months or so to add any additional comments. My primarily uses are at the moment are: Phone/ laptop backup and shares (Synology Drive) photography file managing and organization, It's more than a giant hard drive. I also have DNS (Domain Naming service) running on it for the network. Docker, which allows you the ability to build virtual machines within your NAS. (pretty useful) If you are thinking of purchasing this Synology 920+ I can assure you, this a great NAS with enough options to upgrade in the future. As it supports the additional drive unit which can be attached. ( If you go with additional expansion bays, I suggest creating separate volumes for each unit rather than creating 1 volume across both units.) you are also able to upgrade the memory to 8GB and add SSD caching to further improve the performance. If you have any question, please ask. Thank you

For an at home NAS, perfect. Synology works well for backup of my work stuff, photography as well as our phones - helps avoid paying a bunch of cloud fees. now, it does require some work to ensure everything is connected properly, setup and maintained but far outweighs other complications. love the dual LAN ports, speeds are great. placed it out of sight so no noise issues.

Yes, this NAS can do a lot more than just being a Plex server and a file server, but that's all I'm using at this moment. I will update this review if I start adding significantly more features to the NAS. First of all, even with a Celeron processor, it has no problems transcoding 4K video in real time for display on other devices through Plex. When transcoding 4K to my iPhone XR, the CPU usage was around 5%. That means this little NAS could likely handle multiple 4K transcoding streams at once... probably limited more by network bandwidth than CPU power. This is likely because this is a very recent Celeron that just came out in the 4th quarter of 2019. The one thing that really surprised me was the quality of its user interface. It is web-based, but if you put it in full screen in your browser, it looks like (and works like) Linux. They really put a lot of effort into the user interface! Configuring things in the Control Panel has "basic" and "advanced" options, so even beginner users won't be overwhelmed. It's one-click easy to add new "packages" (add-in programs, essentially) to your NAS. Adding Plex is a single click and you're off. I enabled SSH to better communicate with my Linux servers and was surprised that the software didn't automatically create a home directory for my user account. It's easy to resolve, but it was an oversight. A very small one., and about the only thing that didn't work absolutely perfectly right out of the box. Migrating files from my failing 5TB external drive (NTFS formatted) to the NAS was as easy as plugging the drive into the front USB port. The user interface picked it up immediately, and I was able to use the File Station to move the files exactly where I wanted them. I purchased my DS920+ with two 8TB Seagate Iron Wolf NAS drives, with the thought that I can add up to two more in the future. When I need the storage, I will update this review and talk about how easy/difficult it was. Note that the Iron Wolf drives "tick" every 5 seconds or so, so if you are using this NAS in a bedroom, it might be annoying to you. My NAS is in my closet with my other networking equipment so I don't notice the noise.

First off: I am not an expert level user. This NAS more than exceeded my home needs. I purchased this DS923+ to replace my old DS213J (worked well enough for me, but I was starting to detect some issues on my old drives in the DS213j. For the price of this NAS I have to take a star away for having a 1GbE speed LAN ports. (It does have 2 of them). But the old DS213J had one 1GbE port. Yes you could purchase a Synology expansion device but I think I would rather buy another NAS than spend the money on an expansion unit. Going from 512MB DDR3 ram to 4GB DDR4 ECC RAM is a very nice upgrade. Having more RAM and CPU is something expect from a PLUS (+) NAS from Synology. Going from 2 USB 2.0 port (480Mbs) to 2 USB 3.2 Gen1 ports (5Gps) is a very nice upgrade.... but I have trouble finding USB external that come close to going that fast. Having a fast LAN ethernet cable would have been a lot better for me. General use: The UI and setup of the DS923+ was very snappy when compared to my old DS213j. I did not have any issues transferring my data to the new NAS. Bit sad/frustrating that this NAS does not have a good enough hardware to transcode video fast enough to use as a video server. That is not the NAS you want if you want to be able to do stuff like that. Software: The synology OS has improved over time and has been rather reliable to me. It was more than a bit confusing figuring out what all of the modules do and what can be removed (without causing more problems for me). I am using FOUR Seagate IronWolf 4TB drives ST4000VNZ06/006 drives. They are CMR drives. I have not experienced any issues using them in my NAS. 4 out of 5 stars for me. I wish it was a bit cheaper or came with a faster LAN out of the box.

I work as a technician for a number of clients, both personal and in small business. One of my clients had ongoing issues replacing their old server (they didn't know what they were doing and got themselves into trouble, which is where I came in). After a day or two of looking at their "new server" and then what they needed (basically, just file storage/sharing), I thought a NAS would meet their needs. I already owned (personally) a small NAS, but I hated it, so I went shopping for something of higher quality. I hit upon Synology as the obvious choice in this range, and while the pricing was higher than "what you could get a NAS for", it was still far less expensive than my client's alternatives. The hardware is easy to set up, even if you're adding RAM or cache disks, as long as you're comfortable doing some basic hardware-type stuff. Adding disks is easier than changing disks in a desktop (but 2.5 drives will need an adapter). Adding RAM is a little bit easier than would be in a laptop (you have to remove some of the disks, but don't need tools). Adding cache disks is similar to adding RAM to a laptop-- flip it over, screwdriver, insert, ya done. IMPORTANT: if you want write-caching, you HAVE to use a second cache disk. For whatever reason, you can't split a cache volume for read/write. If you have just one disk, you can only use Read caching. I wish I had known this ahead of time, or I wouldn't have gotten as large a cache volume, though it is serving me pretty well. Once booted up and online, though, is when a world of wonder begins. The system has feature upon feature upon feature, allowing it to replace far more than just a file server, at no extra cost. There is a package system where you can download optional packages, including things like: Video streaming service (2 kinds!), audio server (complete with mobile app to stream your own music to your phone), Cloud Storage (your own personal Dropbox), system backup (that is, software to backup systems on your network to the NAS) and ways to back up the NAS to elsewhere, IP camera software (with a few licenses included), mail server, group calendar, WebDAV connections, and so much other stuff. You could certainly get all of these features by building your own NAS and using all the open source software out there, but for the amount of effort and ease-of-use here, it's no contest. One thing I was very impressed by with the initial configuration is that Synology have their own type of RAID setup called (SHR-- Synology Hybrid RAID). It has the data-protection and speed benefits of a RAID, but allows it to be used across completely dissimilar disks, as well as adding disks to the same SHR later on (and the volume checking and expansion happens while the NAS is still working)-- this definitely lowers the commitment anxiety to setting up a new disk array. It also has a USB 3.0 port in the front, and you can add external disks that can be mounted and shared seamlessly. The system is highly configurable through the UI, but you can also open a Terminal, or use SSH (if enabled). The task scheduling system can call bash scripts, also. This makes me feel like the UI is a convenience, not a required hindrance. That said, though, the UI is ridiculously thorough.

Very easy to setup. All of the Synology devices are solid. Make sure yo read that this is drive-less.... you must order the drives too. I installed Seagate Ironwolf Red drives. The fan is very quite, its really easy to setup any backup structure you want to use. and the value is great for the quality.