Review: Synology DS220+ NAS – Sleek Home Storage

The concept of a NAS is not a new one. Network-Attached Storage (NAS) has been around for quite some time – especially if you’re old enough to have shared a folder on a network from a Windows PC back in the day.

And with the rise of music and video streaming, demand for in-home storage of mp3 (music) and mp4/mov (video) files has waned. That is if you look at NAS from the perspective of a decade ago.

Today the NAS is fundamental to any content creator that needs to store large amounts of raw content – across scores of files – that are in turn accessible anywhere, at any time. NAS is also the backbone of any home or workplace video surveillance system and the long-term preservation of the thousands of photos that we take on our devices.

Synology has been making storage systems for over twenty years now, and let’s just say they are very good at what they do.

We’ve been lucky enough to have recently tried out the new DS220+ NAS specifically designed for the home and small-business market – delivering super reliable and super-fast file sharing and multimedia streaming.

Key Features

• Twin disc trays
• 2-core 2.0 GHz, burst up to 2.9 GHz
• 2 x 1GbE LAN ports
• RAID 1 setup protects against sudden drive failure
• 17% faster indexing than its predecessor
• Accelerated Application Performance
  • Average 15% performance boost to photo indexing and other computing-intensive operations, as well as database response time
• Effortless Data Sharing & Synchronisation
  • Access, share, and sync your data easily across different operating systems and devices
• Protect and Restore Data in a Snap
  • Back up critical data and reduce your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) with Snapshot Replication
• Entertaining Multimedia Hub
  • Organise and stream your music, video, and photo collections across all your devices
• Anytime, Anywhere
  • Freely access files on the go and back up mobile photos with iOS and Android apps

We loaded a pair of 2TB Seagate Ironwolf drives into the trays and within minutes we were up and running with a cloud-connected NAS in minutes.

The latest version of Synology’s DSM (DiskStation Manager) is the intuitive browser-based operating system that powers every Synology NAS.

From here every element and operation of your Synology NAS can be customised so you get just what you need for your home media needs or the needs of your business – be it small or growing fast.

At home we’ve connected the Synology DS220+ NAS to our Plex Media Server and all our content – photos, videos, music and more are available on all our smart TVs and devices whether we are at home or on the go thanks to the Synology Drive app that turns the DS220+ into a private cloud drive.

The Synology DS220+ NAS is priced around $500 from Amazon

Now that we’re up and running, we’ll come back to this review in a few weeks to let you know what it’s like to live with.

Stay tuned…