Synology DS220j: The ONLY Budget NAS Worth Considering

there are very few technology devices that I would consider essential to my life but a network attached storage system or na s device is one of those this is the ds2 20 Jason ologies latest device in their j-series budget devices and I'm here to tell you why this is a fantastic value entry point for beginners to the world of network attached storage join me James Bruce for make yourself calm reviews as I take a closer look at the ds2 20 J Hardware why you might want an AZ on your network and also in a separate video we'll be taking a closer look at surveillance station which is Solange's own software for turning this into a networked video recorder for your IP cameras alright let's get on with a review now since this is an entry-level device designed for beginners I did want to briefly explain what is a network attached storage system and why you might want one so the network attached part of it should be fairly self-explanatory instead of attaching a hard disk directly to your computer through USB you will plug this in to your router and then that hard disk will be made available to everyone on your local network now the biggest reason to do this is so that you can access those files through multiple computers and not just computers but also mobile devices tablets Smart TVs they'll all be able to get access to the files stored on here now that means that if you put say some movie files on there it's like having your own personal Netflix only instead of streaming from the cloud you're gonna be streaming it from your own local network but a network attached storage system like this is not just a fantastic way of backing up all of your devices to one central secure location it's also sort of like a mini PC in fact it can run a whole variety of different server software components so to give you some quick examples I run a plex server on my own as which serves up and transcodes media files for every device in the house I mentioned earlier that this can be used as a network video recorder to record from IP cams that's another thing that it can do as well as doing all of your backups and file storage you don't need to convert it into a video recorder it's just something that you can install and it will do that as well it's like a little mini computer but an ultra power efficient one another really popular package that Synology offers is called moments and it's a photo management software so it can backup from all of your mobile devices as a central store for your photographs it'll recognize the faces and objects and it's just a great way of managing and keeping your family photos secure rather than having them uploaded to someone else's cloud server you can keep all of that data locally the only limitation is that because this is an entry level device it won't be able to handle some of the more power intensive server applications that are out there such as running docker virtual machines or using it to transcode 4k video although I did have some luck with Plex running on it and serving up 720p files to a mobile device so that worked fine but there are some limitations another great reason to use an asset rather than a USB Attached hard-disk is for data redundancy and security now hard drives can and do fail which is why there are two hard drive bays in this system you place two hard drives in there and you can set it up so that one is effectively a duplicate of the other meaning that if one of the hard disks ever dies you can simply pull it out your data will remain secure put in another replacement Drive and it all stays secure and safe so I won't say that you will never lose any data but it's quite unlikely that both of the hard disks would fail at exactly the same time now you can configure it if you like to simply be one large data store where it combines both hard disks however I really don't recommend it especially if you're using this as a backup for your devices or for security footage you really want to ensure that the data is safe now again this is an entry level device so you will find only two bays in here there's only two hard disks that you can fit inside however onson ologies more expensive models you'll find four five nine or even more drive bays one of the great things about Synology is that if you do ever upgrade it's really easy to just pull the drives out of this place them into your new system and the data will remain secure from then you can just add more drives to expand your storage pool now another great thing about Synology is called their hybrid raid technology now usually in devices like this you need to add hard disks in pairs and all of the same sizes however thanks to syn ologies hybrid raid you can add as many drives as you like in different sizes and it will automatically optimize that storage array to make the most efficient use of your hard disks while still ensuring that the data is secure so if any of those drives die your system will still be safe and you'll be able to just replace it with the same size or a larger one and then rebuild the array and that's one thing that I really love about Synology devices specifically that you won't find on other manufacturers ok so now that we've discussed why you might want a network attached storage system let's take a closer look at the ds2 20j hardware superficially the ds2 20j looks a lot like the previous generation 218 J it's not ugly by any means but it is all white plastic shell with grey and black accents inside however there have been some significant Hardware bumps you'll find a 1.4 gigahertz quad-core arm CPU up from a dual-core 1.3 gigahertz CPU and you'll find 512 megabytes of ddr4 ram rather than ddr3 on the previous generation and that is in fact a significant performance boost on the connectivity side around the rear you'll find 2 USB 3 ports and a single Ethernet gigabit port there are no USB ports on the front of the device however the ones around the back can be used either for adding in additional storage just by plugging in a USB hard disk it'll be made available on your network though it won't be a part of your storage array it won't be secure or you can add in a printer if your printer doesn't have network capabilities you can put it on here and make it available to everyone on the network like all network attached storage systems you'll probably be buying this device bare which means it won't come any drives and you will need to factor in the cost of buying additional drives or you can put in some of your old ones to fit those into the system simply unscrew around the rear and then pull the case off and they slide straight in it's very simple now it does also accept 2.5 inch disks such as SSDs however you're only really going to be looking at using an SSD once you have five Bay's or more because you'll want to use one say a caching system in a tube a system it doesn't really make sense your next step is to connect the ethernet to your router and power it up and from there all of the management of the system will be done using this web interface you don't you can't actually connect an HDMI monitor or keyboard to the device you don't need to you can do it all over the network from any of your other devices however I would recommend using a desktop things can get a little bit fiddly for setup on a mobile device so go ahead and access find dot Synology com this will automatically detect any Synology boxes that it's found on your local area network and you should then hit the connect button then you set some account details name your server and you'll be all ready then you'll be given the guided tour of the web interface I should just note that by default it's going to load you into the admin screen through the IP address however it's a lot easier to remember if you use the local naming system any modern router should support essentially you want to type in whatever the name you gave to your network storage system is plus Doppler so in mine I called it CCTV so all I need to do in my browser address bar is type in CCTV dot local and it will go straight to the web interface it's just a lot easier than remembering a series of IP address numbers so this is the web interface it's really like a little desktop computer so you have the package center control panel file browser and up in the top left there's a sort of Start menu and now is a good time to show you you can drag and drop icons to the desktop if you want to for apps that you install later which you want frequent use of but first things first open up storage manager and go to the volume tab from the left and click oncreate just walk through the wizard assuming you have your two drives installed all the defaults should be fine a quick word on a type of volumes here the default easy setup is for Synology hybrid raid or SHR with one disk fault tolerance which as I mentioned means one is essentially a duplicate of the other now although it does support standard raid 0 or 1 setups if you click on advanced I wouldn't suggest using those not because it'll be any more efficient to use the SHR system I mean it won't be in a tube a device only once you get to three or more drives does it become more efficient but simply because I suspect 5 or 10 years later down the line you may want to upgrade to a bigger more powerful device with more drives and at that point you can simply take these out of here put them in the new device and it'll upgrade itself then you can continue on adding more hard disks which might be of a mixed size I started my own network storage system a very long time ago with a mix of one terabyte and five gigabyte drives and over the years the hybrid raid has kept my data safe I've been able to upgrade it to more one terabyte drives then 2 then 4 then 8 and 10 it's gone through so many upgrades by now and it's just been solid the whole time so I definitely recommend using SHR rather than your standard raid systems the only requirement you need to remember with Synology hybrid raid is that if you're adding a drive it always needs to be as big as the smallest Drive already in your system so if you have two one terabyte drives you couldn't add in a smaller 500 but you could add another 1 terabyte a 2 terabyte or even larger and then next time it's the same thing it always has to be as big as or bigger than the smallest Drive in your complete system so this is really for me one of the biggest selling points about Synology network storage systems because I can't always afford to buy the largest drive possibly out there instead I can mix and match drives as and when I can afford to that's not to say everything else about Synology isn't fantastic but that alone is a big selling point for me personally so once you're done with that wizard building your storage array is going to take some time to complete fully especially with larger drives and to verify the discs so you'll probably hear them clicking away but you should be able to use the system in the meantime I'll be it with possibly a little performance hit so moving on setting up a network shared folder is really simple just open up the file station app you can see I've already got a SharePoint set up here for surveillance footage check out the other video to learn more about the ds2 20j as a network video recorder but for now let me just show you how easy it is to create another one so we'll go ahead and create a new shared folder i'll call it movies and i'm going to encrypt this just to show you of course there's no way to recover this data from an encrypted folder if you forget the password and lose the key file so don't do that I've also set the permissions for my user to read/write as well as all members of the admin group and guest access is disabled by default but you can also explicitly define that here if you want you can set it up to automatically mount these encrypted drives on restart or power failure but I'd prefer to just keep mine manually mounted to do that just right click hit mount and type in your password I mean it's really that simple you'll now find that share on your network places and if you don't want it to show anyone on your network you can also hide it so creating simple Network file shares is just a tiny fraction of what the ds2 20j can do if you open up package center and take a look at the list of server software there you'll find hundreds of applications from things like local versions of your favorite cloud software that you can now run on your own network instead of trusting your data to a cloud provider you'll find photo management software even WordPress if you wanted to run that here you could develop your own blog work on the theme that sort of thing however I don't suggest actually opening this up to the world and running a public-facing website from there it's really just for development purposes as I mentioned I also installed plex just to give that a try and it was perfectly capable of transcoding to sort of 720p for a mobile device but did have problems when it came to higher resolutions that said if you have a more powerful client if you're only going to be streaming to your computer or laptop then you can still use Plex and it will stream at the original native resolution just fine it's only once you start getting into things like recording from live TV or transcoding 4k that you'll need to look at more expensive more powerful networked devices like the ds4 14-play which is specifically designed for media applications with an Intel chip inside of it in terms of actual performance testing it's pretty difficult to publish any sort of reliable numbers on that it's really going to depend on your individual setup as to what results you'll get from it for instance the type of cabling you have whether you're connected over Ethernet or Wi-Fi how many switches and network devices you're going through whether your drives are encrypted how many other things this device is doing for you but to give you a rough example I managed to connect this up and copy a 1 gigabyte file onto it in less than five seconds from my Mac and that's when they were both connected to the same gigabit switch just here however by contrast I don't get speeds anywhere near that sort of thing to my other network storage system now the ds4 14-play simply because it goes through a number of different cable runs which aren't all of the same quality there's a couple of switches in between the drives are encrypted so just to make that point that the performance you get out of it will depend entirely on your own setup and the sort of cabling that you're using the bottleneck will be in your network rather than in this device itself of course you're always going to get better performance streaming files or movies from a local network device than you are from a cloud provider especially if your internet isn't reliable where you are so I hope that's given you a good overview of the ds2 20j how easy it is to use how easy it is to set up a network share and some of the other things that it's capable of doing for you so should you buy the ds2 20j there's no doubt in my mind that this is the best budget entry point network attached storage system for beginners it's not a pro-level device and the price reflects that you're not going to be running some of them all powerful server virtual machines that sort of thing on it but if you're new to the world of network attached storage this is a fantastic device even if you can find competitors devices twenty thirty dollars cheaper I still would recommend this over them any day simply because of its ease of use and reliability and the things like Synology hybrid raid which are unique to Synology devices you will not find that anywhere else in addition the native software that they offer such as the moments photo management app or the surveillance station for networked video recording adds so much value to Synology devices more than anything I give a personal recommendation of the ds2 20j and Synology devices because I've been running them for well over a decade now I started on a J Series budget device much like this and have slowly upgraded over the years I've had hard disks fail of course they're always going to fail that sort of thing does happen which is exactly why you need something like this to ensure that your data is safe anyway as soon as the drive fails it just beeps at me I pull it out replace it everything's fine so anyway thanks to Synology for sending this over for review and they've also offered up an incredible prize package for one lucky viewer they'll be giving you a DS 220 J a couple of Seagate iron wolf hard disks to put in there as well as a couple of IP cameras to get you started as a networked video recorder that's an amazing prize package believe me and to be in with a chance of winning just head on over to make use of calm to the link in the description and you'll find a giveaway widget at the end of the review just pop your details in there and you will be in with a chance of winning the video bonus code you're looking for four extra entries is hybrid raid and you'll also find another video bonus code over on the separate video we made about using this as a network video recorder so be sure to watch that as well if you want that bonus code the competition closes in about a month's time and please add competitions that make yourself calm to your address book to ensure that emailed to you telling you that you have one does not go into your spam box good luck and until next time please hit like and consider subscribing for more tips tricks and hardware reviews from all of us at make use of calm

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Id: 41GR8YqvqD4

Length: 18min 7sec (1087 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 24 2020