OS AND USER INTERFACEDSM 6.0’s main interface.Once the install is complete, you’re presented with a short guide that explains the basics of the interface, and then a help knowledgebase. Once that’s done with, you’re left with the main page of DSM 6.0 and your adventure with Synology’s NAS begins. As you can see, the desktop supports widgets which I thought is a nice touch as you can see some useful information at a glance.
The OS is pretty simple, its accessed through a browser and works flawlessly on my experience with both Chrome and Firefox, I did not test it with Microsoft Edge (not sure if I needed to, does anyone actually use Edge?
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It works surprisingly well over the web too, with its clean and lean interface. It’s far smoother to use as compared to maybe using VNC remotely on a more traditional OS.
For someone who’s used Windows or Ubuntu, it doesn’t take much to get used to in terms of the interface. The only difference for Windows users is that the equivalent of the Start button and taskbar are located at the top instead of the bottom.
DSM's Main MenuOnce you click the ‘main menu’ you’re presented with a bunch of icons representing the currently installed applications on the device. Every open application appears in the ‘task bar’ area at the top next to the ‘main menu’. Multi-tasking is as simple as switching between the apps by clicking on the respective icon in the task bar. Minimizing/Maximizing applications is also an option, so its pretty much what you would expect from any desktop OS.
Personally I quite like it, it’s easy to use and intuitive, I didn’t have to spend any time being frustrated I couldn’t find some option or something hidden somewhere. The only thing I kept doing at first was clicking the browser’s ‘back’ button when I wanted to go back to a previous menu or to the desktop, but that’s nothing I can blame the OS for.
The package store has quite a few packages available for download that further extend the disk station’s features, most are free however there are some that are not. There is also a ‘manual install’ option available, which is basically ‘sideloading’, in case you want to install something that you can’t find in the package centre I suppose.
Synology’s offerings in the Package Centre (what could be called an ‘app store’)And these are the third party offerings that are currently available.As you can see in the 3rd party package offerings, many programming/scripting language (Python, Ruby, Perl, for example) support packages are available. I can foresee that people can get very creative in running some scripts as scheduled tasks to run maintenance/cleanup/download or even to sort out their media library.
Some of what’s available is to make setting up web servers a possibility (you’ll notice PHP and Tomcat there, as well as things like WordPress and Joomla).
There’s a lot of varied stuff on offer in Synology’s first party offerings as well, if you’re interested in setting up a proxy server to load content cached on your disk station as a priority, you can. If you want to setup your disk station as a VPN server, you can do that too. DNS server? Sure. iTunes server (I didn’t even know that was a thing, but I happen to stay away from the Apple ecosystem so pardon my ignorance)? Oh yes. Heck you can even set your disk station up as a RADIUS server (I suppose there’s some corporate networks that might find that useful). Git and SVN support is available as well, so you can have your own internal version control setup simplified for those small enterprises.
Obviously, for a home user, the vast majority of these options will not be used and I’m sure many of you read the past couple of paragraphs and wondered what the hell I was talking about for half of it. But Synology has a wide target market for their DSM 6.0 OS based devices, and it’s evident here. Its also nice that there aren’t any restrictions placed on which packages you can install, so if you’re feeling extra geeky you can try setting up whatever you want.
MOBILE EXPERIENCEAnother facet of the OS/interface has to be the mobile experience. In this day and age with this kind of device and its’ cloud capabilities, we also have to assess the accessibility and ease of use from a mobile device perspective.
It’s great that you can access your NAS from the web remotely on a PC, but it’s even better if you can do so as reliably and as efficiently from a smartphone as well, so let’s take a look and see how the mobile experience is like.
(L - R) The mobile menu // The resource monitor on mobile.The DS216j (or any other DSM6.0-based Synology DiskStation NAS) is quite easily accessible from a mobile device, you can just do what you do on a desktop, that is open a browser and enter the QuickConnect URL you were provided upon which you’ll be presented with the mobile version of DSM. The mobile page is more streamlined and limited, in the sense that you’re presented with some menus where you can edit the settings of the DS and also check up on the status. However there is the option of switching to the desktop mode (which will turn the interface into what we see on a PC browser).
(L - R) Services // Full Desktop ModeThe full desktop mode is a little finicky on a phone, but I can see it being useful on a tablet which has a much larger screen size. I tested the interface on both Firefox for Android and Chrome, and the latter worked better – there were some issues with the interface looking funny and buttons going missing on Firefox for Android. The full desktop mode was problematic on both in the sense that often my taps weren’t registered, but I think this might be due to the browser not sure where exactly I was tapping. Unfortunately I don’t have a tablet on hand for me to test this out.
Synology's first party apps on the Google Play StoreIn any case, the functionality of the disk station is extended on the mobile space by use of apps, and Synology covers the basics here with their app offerings.
This post has been edited by chapree: Dec 6 2016, 12:22 AM