NAS

Network. Attached. Storage.

Something that the general consumer has no clear idea what it is about, let alone how to use it. Ironically most of them have already been using Google Drive or Apple iCloud or Microsoft OneDrive for many years and appreciate having it for cloud storage, backup, data sync, sharing, and plenty other more functions. NAS can feel quite overwhelming when first time using it, especially since the very nature of NAS is to have extensive functions that cater to almost every type of needs. The good news is that these days most NAS operating systems have been designed to be more user friendly, 1 click function. You can just use it for basic needs such as storing data, doing backup, and then expand on your usage in future when you discover additional things you can do with NAS. I have been using NAS for years and yet till now I am still just realizing additional functions that can be performed by NAS.

Enough of my rambling, let’s start with the review.


Hardware

An unbleached box with a paper stick in front of it for the model number and some specs greet you when you receive it. Simplistic or eco-friendly is best described for it or cheap is worse description for it. Depends how you view the world.


On the side there’s some info for the NAS size, weight, ports, warranty and also the contents in the box


Finally, the main course. The protagonist. The Mr. Gorgeous. The DS920+ in full black stealth mode. It is actually more compact than what I thought it is from internet picture. It is also very light thanks to it’s compact design and plastic shell. Power button, 1 USB 3.0 port and 5 LED light at the front.


On the back, most of it is occupied by 2 massive fans doing it’s job to suck out all the heat those HDD produce, I would say it’s quite efficient and silent. There’s 2 network ports with 1 Gb/s speed each in here. You can set it as link aggregation to achieve 2 Gb/s speed but I would prefer if 1 or both of the ports is 2.5Gb/s, newer routers these days have started to come with 2.5 Gb/s ports so having port with such speed will make it more future-proof. There’s eSATA port and one more USB port. There's a small hole for poking with a pin to reset the NAS, a small inconvenience to pay for avoiding any accidental reset. It also got Kensington lock, don’t want people to run off with your precious data right. Power port that looks like a PS/2 port, not a fan of it, really hard to guess whether you align it properly when trying to connect the cable without having the DS920+ back facing you.


At the bottom we find 2 slots for M.2 NVME, add one stick of SSD for read cache or add 2 sticks for read and write cache, useful to improve the responsiveness of your frequently read and/or write files, HDD after all has very low IOPS if compared to SSD. Might also help to improve the HDD longevity too. But sadly it can’t be configured to be a storage pool, maybe in future Synology will add it seeing how their other competitors already added the function.


Inside of the NAS, I like how 3 sides of the wall is fully utilised for airflow. 1 side with it’s motherboard so obviously can’t be used for airflow. Even the SATA board have cut-out to improve airflow. Synology have done a really good job here at making sure the HDD can be cooled off properly.


The inside right side is where the empty DDR4 slot houses. You can add RAM to expand the memory from it’s default 4GB, but you can’t remove the existing 4GB RAM as it is soldered on the NAS.


The HDD tray using clip on instead of screw to secure the HDD, it makes mount and unmount HDD more simplified. It also has rubber as a damper between the clip, that should help to minimize vibration.


The installation guide. Compared it to an installation guide from 10 years ago. Lucky we have the internet these days, no more flipping through text book thick guides.


I like how the logo is also used as an air vent to cool down internal components. You can install LED strips on it if want some bling-bling LOL

DiskStation Manager (DSM)

After installing the HDD, boot up the DS920+ and plug in LAN cable, accessing the DSM is very easy, follow the installation guide that asks you to open http://find.synology.com on your web browser. It will start searching for Synology NAS on the network and when it finds it, it will ask you to connect.


After agreeing to some Synology’s EULA, time to start setting it up. First you need to install the latest DSM. It will automatically download the latest DSM from Synology server and install it. But somehow it failed to download the installation file, after trying for a few times and still failing I then manually downloaded the DSM and manual install it. Ironically it detected as if I moved the HDD from another DiskStation to this DS920+, maybe the failed download being flagged as previous installation. Just to be safe I go for Reinstallation. After few minutes it finish install and restart the NAS


First thing after restarting, DSM asks you to create an administrator account. After creating it you will use this account to login into DSM. The default administrator name account will be disabled. This is a good move from Synology as a lot of NAS being hacked are due to the user still using default administrator name account, one less thing for hackers to guess or dig for info. After that you can also create QuickConnect ID if you need to access DS920+ outside of your local network. QuickConnect is an alternative method than using DDNS. There's a risk of being hacked if your NAS is connected to the internet, the best way is using VPN to access your NAS. If use without VPN, you can also minimized the risk by always changing QuickConnect ID, using 2FA authentication, strong password, only use https, change default port to higher than 1024, use firewall and geolocation blocking, disable any service you not using such as FTP or SSH, use proxy server, enable auto block, among others. Anyway, after finishing it you are presented with some quick start tips before finally having access to the desktop.


Top left is the Main Menu, similar to the WINDOWS button, it opens to show all apps that you have. Top middle is the taskbar that will show icons for all apps that are open. Top most right when clicking will show/hide the widget, you can choose a lot of options to show on the widget, which is scrollable. Second most right is the search function, it will list out all that it finds the moment you type. You need to add folders/volume to be indexed first though to make it searchable, by default it will not auto add new volume to be indexed. Third most right is setting for the current logged on user, you can change account settings and desktop theme, among others. And the last is when click it will show all notifications, it can also be customized what service will show notification.


What I like about the DSM's desktop is you have all your apps in the Main Menu and you can add apps that you frequently use on the desktop. On some other NAS all the apps are on the desktop only. When you have multiple windows open and you want to open another app, having a Main Menu that houses all apps is very useful, whereas if all apps only on desktop you have to minimize open windows then only you’ll be able to open apps on desktop.

To start using the HDD that you have plugged in, first go to the Storage Manager and create a storage pool, here you can specify whether to create a single disk as single volume or as RAID, and the type of RAID that you need. SHR is Synology's own RAID method which it will adjust accordingly depending on HDDs connected, SHR also can also be expanded when you add HDD without the need to destroy and create a new pool. RAID-1 option if you only need mirroring or will only use 2 HDDs. RAID-5 option if you have 3 or more HDD and want to maximize your usable space. It will recommend to perform a drive check which will scrub the whole disk to check for any bad sectors. For this pool I choose SHR for RAID type as I want the flexibility of adding different sizes of HDD in future while still maximizing my storage pool.


One thing to note is if you have all the HDD ready to use, it’s better to plug all of them and let Synology OS verify all the HDDs at the same time. I have 2 8TB HDDs but only plug 1 first, it takes 12 hours to complete verifying. After that I plug in the second HDD and it takes 24 hours to complete checking and expanding. Around this time the third HDD that I ordered arrived and it takes about 36 hours to complete checking and expanding the last HDD. Including idle time it takes me a total of almost 5 days to complete the storage pool.

(When my first HDD start verifying)

After creating the storage pool, it is time to create volume or volumes. You can have more than 1 volume in your storage pool if you have specific needs. For the file system you can choose either BTRFS or EXT4. During volume creation you can set how many GB you want to allocate for each volume. Since I don't need more than 1 volume so I maximized the size and use BTRFS for the file system since it can do checksum, self-healing, snapshots, and many more.


Finally time to create Folder, this can be accessed from Control Panel > Shared Folder. Here is your management of each Folder. In NAS terms, Folder is something like how Windows sees a drive. Instead of a drive letter, here you put a name for Folder. You can also have a description of it. Can choose to hide any Folder from My Network Places. If you have more than 1 volume, you can choose which volume each Folder is located, whether to use Recycle Bin, encrypt the Folder, set quota, enable checksum, file compression, and self-healing for data integrity, which account can have access to each Folder, and many more. More than enough for home users and still satisfied corporate users.


One thing is I noticed, the Toshiba HDD is reported as running much cooler in Synology than my old Asustor NAS. Since the temperature data is being read from the HDD itself, I don’t think it’s misreported by any of the NAS. But the difference is too big to ignore. As I said earlier, Synology did a good job in making sure the components inside are cooled off.


Since DS920+ also has 2 M.2 NVME slots, I add 2 256GB Gen 3 SSD and configure it for read and write cache. The system will configure both SSD as RAID-1. If you only install 1 SSD then it can only act as a read cache. Performance wise, after some time using it, I don’t feel any slowdown when loading files that I access frequently. The Cache Hit Rate does look impressive. How much improvement is hard to say since on a system without dedicated cache, usually it will use free RAM as cache.


This post has been edited by xxboxx: Nov 24 2020, 02:45 AM

Transfer Rate

File transfer rate is one of the important things that NAS handle. I’ll try doing transfer between HDD in the NAS as well as between other devices over gigabit LAN.

First test is read from a single HDD volume and written to 3 HDDs that are in SHR. The single HDD is WD40EFRX, spec listed its transfer rate is up to 150MB/s. No problem achieving such speed.


Writing back to the single HDD also shows similar results. DS920+ clearly has no issue maximizing internal transfer rate. CPU usage is also comfortably low.


Second test is using CIFS for transfer, transfer with Windows 10 on the ethernet line. File from DS920+ sent to Windows 10, no problem to reach and maintain maximum speed.


File from Windows 10 send to DS920+ also no problem to maintain gigabit maximum speed. The CPU utilization is also at the low side.


Transfer from another device to DS920+ using NFS. Transfer to and from another device also has no problem to saturate the maximum gigabit speed. This NAS has no problem for gigabit speed transfer and does so without it’s CPU breaking any sweat.



Package Center


Here are all the apps that you can install/uninstall. You can sort it by type of usage for easier searching. Apps that have been installed can also be stopped in here to temporarily free up system usage instead of uninstalling it. It also groups Synology own apps and third party apps separately. Plenty of third party apps are available, such as Docker, Apache HTTP server, Maria DB, Plex, Python, Team Viewer. It also has a tab for Installed apps for easier management.

Video Streaming using DLNA, Plex and Video Station

DLNA is a media server/client protocol that is most widely used. It makes it very easy to stream video/music/photos to compatible devices using this protocol. Windows already are capable of receiving DLNA streams natively. Android devices can receive streams by installing DLNA supported apps such as VLC. Most smart TVs also have DLNA. I prefer using this protocol to stream video to my TV as it is very straight forward, there’s no complex setup that needs to be done. Additionally the video streamed is not transcoded, so it maintains the original video quality. To use this function, the Media Server app must be installed first and you have to set which folders to index video, music, and photos. There’s not much impact on CPU usage as it’s basically the same as transferring files over the network.


Using Plex is also possible with this NAS. I’ll look at how the CPU handles transcoding as that is the appeal of using Plex. I don't have Plex pass so H.265/HEVC video can’t be playback on its original format, it has to be transcoded first while H.264 video can be playback on its original format. First test is using 4K 10-bit HDR HEVC/H.265 video. The CPU goes into maximum speed transcoding the video to stream. It stays at 100% all the time when the video is playing. System temperature also increased to the highest I saw was 74c, up a lot from the usual 48c to 55c when idle or transferring files.


Converting the video down to 1080p 8Mbps lowest bitrate doesn’t help either. CPU still goes to maximum, system temperature also stays hot. And yet the CPU can’t transcode fast enough for smooth playback.


Using 1080p H.264 video, Plex can stream it directly without needing to convert, not much impact on CPU and video playback smoothly.


Converting the same 1080p video to 720p at high setting, CPU usage increased to 100% initially and stabilized to 40% after converting enough buffer. Video does playback smoothly. CPU still run hot.


Using the jellyfish video, I was able to playback smoothly for H.264 up to 110Mbps 1080p video. Going one resolution up to 4K, H.264 120Mbps video and it just loading without playback, but not much CPU processing though and it still streams the video. I think the problem lies on Chrome or Plex.


Synology also has their own video player app called Video Station. You can playback on a web browser or stream it to compatible devices such as Chromecast or smart tv. It also will find image cover automatically based on the folder name. I tried playback on a web browser. Playback 1080p H.264 video went smoothly and not much CPU usage.


It can also playback 1080p H.265/HEVC video smoothly but I think it converts to H.264 as can't choose Original for Playback Quality. Still not much CPU usage.


Going up to 4K H.265/HEVC, video can still be played smoothly. It converts the video to 1080p, can’t choose Original. Not much impact on the CPU shows it is using hardware acceleration to convert the video.


In my opinion, DS920+ are fully capable of streaming video using DLNA or Video Station. Using Plex, as long as you have Plex Pass then you can enable Hardware Acceleration then it will be fine, otherwise the maximum you can go is 1080p H.264. Software transcoding should not be used on DS920+ as the system is not designed to run very hot for a long time.

Photos Station and Moments

With the recent announcement by Google that they will stop offering unlimited photo storage next year, I believe more people will have to start looking for ways to backup their photos. One of the benefits of having NAS is you can have similar functions as what Google offers without the restriction of small storage. I have been backing up my photos and videos on NAS for years now and have more than 100GB data now. If I were to use Google One I need to pay RM120 every year just to store these data. This hasn't included other data. If I include all data that I consider as irreplaceable I will need to subscribe to Google’s 2TB plan which will cost me RM430 annually. And that haven't count my other family members' usage.

Synology has 2 apps for managing your photos, it might sound weird why the need for 2 apps to do the same things, but they have legitimate reasons why the need for 2 apps.

Moments are the newer app, it is targeted for those that just want to upload into backup storage and let the software sort everything by itself, similar to how Google and Apple’s photo app. You just upload the photo from your PC or by installing the mobile phone app and it will upload photos on your mobile phone. The app will auto create albums by itself, grouping by different topics such as people, locations, and subjects. Afterward you can still arrange the photos to each folder yourself. You can also share the photo just like how other cloud providers do. I uploaded 10 photos each of 3 people, a dog and a mountain.


It feels exactly the same as if I’m using Photos. When opened you are presented with the timeline of all your photos. You can also change the folder view on top right. On the most right side you can see the date and click to go to the selected date.


The top middle button without a label is the auto created albums. It will auto sort by people, subjects, and places.


Clicking on the People, it will show all the faces that it recognized as the same person. You can also give a name for each person. Living up to his legend, Keanu is the only one that Moments gets correct of all his 10 photos plus another 3 group photos that are actually from Carrie’s photos.


In the Subjects, it auto recognized 8 out of the 10 dog photos, it didn’t recognize 1 drawing of the dog as a dog (obviously) and one picture of the dog’s running. Interestingly the dog’s running picture is still recognized as an animal. Only 1 photo of the mountain is not recognized as a mountain but instead as a flower due to the sakura's covering almost all the sides. Additionally it also created clouds and lakes as subjects.


Going into the photo, it will display the taken date on the bottom right and location (if available) on the bottom left. The button layout is very familiar to other cloud hoster. You got back on top left, next and previous on both sides, few icons on the top right. First icon is share, where you can create a link that is publicly accessible or specific to the user/group in the NAS. Second icon is Information, where you can see the date taken, filename, camera that took the pic, location if available, which you can click and it’s open Google Maps for the location, you can also add description and tags to the photo. Third button is Edit where you can do auto color and rotate the picture, it’s edit functions is still lacking, maybe Synology will add more functions in future. Next is the Delete button and the last is 3 dots that are to start a slideshow, download it or add to the album.


Moments is actually part of the Drive app, you must have Drive app installed on the NAS before you can install Moments. Drive functions the same as the more well known Drive. It also have the accompanying software that can be installed on PC and mobile phone and behave the same as that well known Drive.


Touching briefly on Photo Station, it is more geared towards professional/corporate use to interact with clients. There’s even an About Me function for you/company's own introduction. In addition to sharing photos or albums, the recipients can also give feedback directly by inputting comments and making highlight areas.


The Information for the photo is way more detailed here than in Moments. You can also add location tag, people tag, general tag, and add comments.


Another thing that Photo Station have is the function to show the pictures on the map. My Oneplus phone’s Gallery also has similar functions and it is always interesting to see how many pictures I have at which location. Due to the limited space on my phone, after I backup the photos to my NAS I will delete the photos on the phone. Now I can see back all those photos based on their location.


I think I wrote way too long already. I’ll touch on a few more functions/apps and end this review. I’ll create another review/guide for Synology’s Drive and Moments as it is very extensive. It basically does everything that Google Drive and Photos can do. This alone might make it worth migrating to Synology especially now that Google have announced no more unlimited photos storage, also if you have few people that will use it and everyone has a lot of data.

Active Backup For Business

If you have plenty of machines, this app helps to consolidate backup for all machines in here. Every backup can be monitored and scheduled here.



Hyper Backup

Hyper Backup is Synology integrated solution for doing backup. Whether you are doing local backup, or to an external device, or to other NAS, or by rsync, or even cloud backup, all of it can be configured here. Currently I have it rsync to my other NAS for backup of my personal data and even Synology own app data.



Virtual Machine

As with almost all NAS these days, DS920+ also supports Virtual Machine. The installation and running it are fairly straight forward. I installed Windows 10 and have it running for 1 week straight. It lasted the whole time without crashing.



Docker

Another third party app that should be mentioned is Docker. From opensource.com: “Docker is a bit like a virtual machine. But unlike a virtual machine, rather than creating a whole virtual operating system, Docker allows applications to use the same Linux kernel as the system that they're running on and only requires applications be shipped with things not already running on the host computer”. I haven’t had a chance to tinker around with it, but this is something that has a lot of usage.



I’ll end my review here. In summary, I feel this DS920+ is a very capable machine. Synology OS is well known for its stability and reliability. Most of it’s software feels more corporate oriented, but it has started to cater for home users too with more simplified apps such as Moments and Drive. Celeron J4125 and 4GB DDR4 is fast enough for most of it’s function, though if you planned to have more apps running and also run virtual machines, upgrading the memory is a must. The CPU also has no problem transcoding H.265/HEVC video, provided the app you use have access to hardware acceleration.

It didn’t come with 2.5Gb/s port feels like a missed opportunity. Nowadays newer routers already start having ports at this speed, and the NAS CPU clearly has no issue handling such speed. M.2 NVME can’t be configured as volume also is a let down.

Overall I think it is a good choice of NAS in terms of performance vs hardware. It is a NAS that excels in transferring files and robust selection of software for plenty of functions. This latest model might be slightly more expensive than it’s former DS918+, but with it you get faster CPU and RAM. In the long run, it is the better choice.

Thanks for reading!

Moments should classified video too but I haven't try much on it. I tried put one video which is H.265/HEVC codec with .mkv extension and Moments doesn't support it. I will try tomorrow using .mp4 H.264 video.

I think almost all of it's newer model support it. But better check at it's website first to confirm. If you only going to use it for storing personal data that at most will take few TB size, getting a 2-bay NAS is enough as it is much cheaper.

I check that 220j does support Drive and Moments apps. It got an entry level hardwares, probably can do basic stuff like transfer files efficiently but probably can't do more CPU intensive stuff such as transcoding video or virtual machine. But the biggest disadvantage I feel is it doesn't support BTRFS, which I feel a must have to make sure data integrity won't be compromised. I would suggest getting the 220+ instead since that model is more powerful and can do almost everything that other bigger model can do.

I tried uploading .mp4 H.264 video to Moments. It will show up in the Moments timeline. Using PC browser it can playback the video inside the browser, but using Moments app on Android, it need external player to playback the video.

I'm using UPS but not those with usb connection.

You need to get UPS that have USB port to connect to NAS. Such as APC Smart UPS.

Seagate HDD for NAS so far still ok.

In the question to seller got mention it can

I believe the UPS send signal that can be interpreted by NAS or PC.
Just to be sure better ask the seller.

Your video is in NAS or PC?

Is that 1 petabyte?


You also using this model? Can transcode up to 9 streams is really something. But running at max speed and all the heat it generated all that time I don't think is good for the NAS in long run.

I also disable hibernation as don't want the HDD to stop-start constantly.

You mean xpenology right?
For testing purpose is okay but I won't recommend for actual backup or storage as it's basically an illegal software and there's no guarantee on stability of the software.

D-link NAS? Does it have something like Google's Drive and Photos? For casual user IMO this is the features that they want the most.
Additionally a NAS that can do redundancy and support for BTRFS is important for data integrity.

Any HDD sizes can be used for system running 24/7

If use RAID-5, all the HDD need to be in same size. You can add bigger HDD but it can only utilize same space as the smallest size HDD in the pool. SHR would be the better choice if mixes sizes HDD as it can maxed out the utilization.

If recovery, RAID-5 need to constantly read from the remaining HDD to do the rebuild, it create more stress to the remaining HDD.
RAID-1 when rebuild poses same risk as RAID-5 in that if another HDD failure it means all the data will be unrecoverable. That is why need to have multiple copies of backup for important data. 3-2-1 backup rule is always the recommended way. If your NAS data is always being use for read and write/amend, that is not backup, that is just your present data. You need to have at least another 2 backup, and one of the backup is stored in different place.

Thanks. It is with 4GB RAM. If normal usage without virtual machine is more than enough. If not enough still got a slot to add RAM.
I see TS-453D have 2.5Gb port, which is useful if your hardware support the faster speed. But I think software side Synology are more polished.

In theory, NVME cache should help if you have same files that you frequently access. If you always open the same files, it will be cached.
If you just open 1 time only to view then won't open it anymore, such as movie or series, then cache won't help. If you always streams same music file then it will help.

1gb ram = 1 tb disk is FreeNAS or ZFS rule.
Prebuilt NAS don't have such requirement.