Synology DS423+ 8TB 4 Bay Desktop NAS Solution installed with 4 x 2TB Western Digital Red Plus Drives

I purchased this to replace a 4TB Raid 1 Synology unit which was getting a bit full. 40TB seemed like a good size, but by the time Raid 5 has been applied and the system set up you are looking at only just under 18TB of admittedly well protected storage. This model needs a lot more setting up than the consumer models, so for example if you want it to be seen as a media server on a Windows PC and on your TV etc. then you have to install the Media Server application. That threw me, because it was already installed automatically on the cosumer models. You also need to create network places and mapped drives yourself, whereas with the consumer version only mapping a drive was needed. There is also very little documentation supplied with the unit and a lot of the online information is not relevant or not dated so you cannot always be sure if it relates to the model you are working with. So, why have I given it five stars? Well, at a little under two grand it gives you a lot of bang for your buck. Installing Media Station and Video station gives you media access anywhere in the world, and you have private cloud storage which in my case was a key requirement as my development computer was close to having a full SSD. 18TB is 18 times the amount on my PC, and 4.5 times the space on my previous Synology, for only three times the price of the old one, so the alternative of buying three more of the old NAS boxes would have been way more expensive. The Raid 5 means that an entire drive could fail without loss of data and just plugging in a spare would result in it rebuilding itself, protecting you against everything but a physical disaster like fire. The software on it is good, it works fine with my phone and my computer, the music seems to be noticably faster to load on the Android app, and data transfer is quick, so what's not to like? The only thing I think is the difficulty of backing up such a large amount of data. Basically you can't unless you want to purchase a massive online backup service at vast cost, or buy two of these and set up a VPN. RAID certainly helps to protect you, but there are circumstances which would cost you your data. A massive media collection and vital data are both things that you do not want to lose, so I will be reviewing my options. This review is based on only a couple of days ownership, so I will definitely come back and edit if anything changes, whether good or bad. For the moment, this is easily the best NAS I have ever owned.

This is by far the best and most dependable NAS Drive I have had. It’s well supported with plenty of instructional videos online. I use it for both a personal cloud and for video editing.