In my previous post I was rambling about Seagate BlackArmor and my sad experience with it. Apart from the sadness it also has my initial thoughts and requirements, so I won’t duplicate them in this one. But, to keep consistent with the previous review I’ll go with the same headings/experience areas. That being said – here we go!
Half a year has passed and I’ve been using Synology NAS for all this time. I ordered it from Amazon and off it came right in the delivery timeframes, ready for my experiments and scrutiny.
Packaging and build quality.
I couldn’t be impressed more. Apple usually is a master in packaging their products, but these guys(synology) can stand up the competition. Everything in the box was perfectly packed a secured in a very little amount of space yet preserving a pleasant unpacking experience. One of the nice things is – when I was moving I managed to pack it with the box I saved just as if it was never unpackaged. Somehow they thought out the packaging in a way you use all the parts, perfectly seal the device and accessories and you have no junk left:) – KUDOS!
Build is a step up from the aforementioned NAS. All the parts that were plastic in seagate are metallic in synology. The drive bay has 2 solid fans and the drives themselves are secured inside the bay with bolts. Accessing the drives is also not that easy – you have to unscrew 4 bolts at the back, lower the back panel with fans and then get to the drives. This is not as convenient as seagate’s open-dorr-click-and-take-away system, but how often do you actually want to replace drives inside your NAS? 😉
Other then that Synology is about the same size and noise, although heavier(due to metal parts). Move on to usage:)
UI and Software.
It comes with DSM 4.2. Usually, when you log into the web interface you would expect some semi-lame web app that’ll link you to the features of your device. Not the case! Not even close! DSM web interface if one of the most(in not just the most) advanced web interfaces I’ve ever seen. It’s all ajax and feels like a fine-tuned linux window manager. you literally have a web-like sort-of OS, working on your NAS giving you full control over it. Pages can be written about all the possibilities you have with the built in apps and there’s even more with thirds party packages. Literally, everything I might have thought/dreamed about that I could combine/use NAS for – is already there. With a nice, multitasking, rich intuitive and responsive interface. I won’t go into much details about the apps – there’s just too many of them to cover and each and every of them deserves good comments. Those who want to learn more – I welcome you to use link I mentioned a couple lines up.
In 6 months I’ve never seen any app crash or misbehave. Neither did I see any hardware faults or reboots. Stable. Reliable.
The worx.
I did the same tests, that I had done for the previous NAS. They all showed good consistent results, so I went on started configuring and placing my data on it. For some reason new apps did not want to install to second partition, so I had to use the first one for all the apps and the second one for all other stuff which was not my initial plan. Whatever. I checked the read/write speeds and they were almost at what the specs were saying. Later I tested out 2 simultanious clients accessing 1080p video from the device, while one other device was listing pictures from it. They all showed decent performance and that is probably the biggest load I’ll ever put on this device. So in general – it worx:).
The problems.
I did not have them:) There was one problem I had not being able to set up Glacier backup from my NAS after I moved. But luckily they do have support forums which helped me understand that my time was not synchronized. After I fixed the time issue everything worked like a charm.
Summary.
pros:
+ build quality
+ realiability
+ software
+ configurability
cons:
– pricey
Bonus.
It costs around 2.5 times more than seagate, but I’d say it’s worth every penny I paid. In fact I was so happy with my purchase that I spread the word around and now a couple of my friends also have similar setups. And neither of them is unhappy. These boxes just work, so far.*all pictures are referenced from www.synology.com