SynologyDS923+ 4 Bay NAS enclosure

Great product and a trusted brand for our storage requirements

Silently does the job, easy to manage and good software

You really can’t go wrong with a synology NAS. Functional, quiet, easy to insert drives and of course DSM is great.This is the 2nd unit that I have bought as I want the ability to use a hot spare as my storage needs have increased.The 1st unit has been in operation for over years and I haven’t looked at it since installation, I expect this to do the same

A good piece of kit

In short this is a great NAS and far more powerful than many will need, for Home or Small Office use. the number of Apps available are mind boggling and the Operating System is nice to use.Its a shame they didn't include a Multi-Gig port as standard, but if you need up to 10Gb LAN then you can fork out another £170 for an add-in module.The flexibility of 4 drive bays, plus NVMe ports is great, and if you need more, you can buy an expansion case for more disks. The CPU doesn't have a built in graphics processor like previous Celeron based models. I've heard a lot of talk about this affecting transcoding of video for applications such as Plex. From my experience, I haven't experienced any performance issues in this respect, but I've only be viewing in 1080P. Those wanting to transcode at 4K (or higher?!) may want to look at other reviews before taking the plunge. If transcoding video is not a concern for you, then this CPU packs a lot of punch in all other areas.On the downside, the Synology compatibility list for disks is extremely limiting. It doesn't seem to have been updated recently either (other than to include all of their own brand disks). So you may find it difficult to even buy a drive that isn't Synology badged if you want to go with their compatibility requirements.Oh, and if you want a RAM upgrade (for running VM's or multiple Apps etc), it supports up to 32GB officially (although I've heard 64GB works if you pick the right RAM chips carefully). However, they only SUPPORT their own brand of RAM. They do not support any other brand of memory. And their Memory chips are really expensive. More than double the cost of any other brand of ECC memory of the same capacity.And a word of caution about their own Hybrid Raid (SHR). I've recently lost 2 drives, which I believe is at least partly due to an issue with the Synology Hybrid RAID. Nothing to prove it, but its highly suspicious that two drives in RAID 1 would suffer the same fault at exactly the same time. Plus, I have heard from other Synology users who have experienced similar issues and they all were using SHR. If you have a standard RAID setup, I'd recommend sticking to standard RAID formats such as RAID 1, 5, or 10.Thats said, I do like my Synology NAS, it's fast, straightforward and well supported with Apps.

It's not cheap, and it's taken me a while to make the jump from direct linked raids to NAS, but this thing is amazing, I still have to fully explore all of the Snology's features but to this point I'm very impressed.

Synology software is still way ahead of everything else out there. This was a breeze to setup

It arrived with only 3 of 4 disk drives installed. On initialising it wasn't able to find any disks. Which is when I discovered one of the drives was missing. The socket the fourth drive was askew so whoever put the three other drives in just gave up?I seem to have return it and re-order it.