Synology DS223j NAS - Should You Buy (Short Review)

foreign [Music] today I want to talk about the Synology ds223 jail though we have a massive review incoming I did want to do another much more short form review for those of you that are on the fence about whether to go for synology's New affordable entry level to buy now solution and in this video I'm going to give you five reasons why you might want to consider getting the ds223 j4 your modest storage needs and five reasons why you might want to give it a big old Miss let's crack on with number one foreign the most obvious one but I do think it's worth touching on this is by far the lowest price point that you were ever going to pay to get into it into a meaningful DSM experience it's not going to be fully featured and I'd say you've only got access to about 70 maybe 75 of the apps but you do have access to in terms of apps and services on the ds223j is really impressive given it's a quad core arm with a giga memory more on that later on so even when you go to the storage area you've got support of things like btrfs you've got support of synergies hybrid radon there and you've got um support of snapshot on top of that when you go into the app center yes you've got access to all the usual applications that you're used to for backing up and of course DSM as a whole but once you go into the mainline packages there you have access to pretty much the entirety of the collaboration Suite so you've got access to Synology Drive you've got access to photo Synology photos with AI recognition and facial recognition included in that by the way it's not turned off just because of it being an arm-based Nas you've also got to survive Island station in here with a couple of licenses included you've got some multi-chatology mail technology office all of those things are rolled in here within this system and you get that included in with the package yes you're not getting all of the applications more on that later on but I've got to say in terms of access to DSM and its fully fledged features running surprisingly well on this modest box you do get a lot packed in with the ds223j foreign keep talking about value without talking about the price right now the ds223j knocks around depending where you are in the world for about 179 to about 189 and again that's a 187 pounds currently at the time of recording 189 Euros at the time of recording for that two by and Synology again that's the lowest price point right now for a Synology to bait without going second hand or going old generation indeed despite the Improvement in several key areas of hardware on this system and improvements in the way DSM 7.2 runs this is still arrived at the same price point as the ds220j that arrived three years ago so again they've done an incredible job to maintain that price point and yet it is an as it is modest Hardware but whether you're going to be utilizing it as a primary Nas or as an existing extension of your own three to one backup strategy whether it is as a complete system backup from your larger nouns or you're going to be using it for things like remote snapshot replication at that price that's in incredibly attractive and again good value when you're looking at the full range of DSM appliances it arrives with support of [Music] next up we alluded to it earlier on but this device arrives with one gig of memory now on the face of it it's not a lot it is just simply not a lot of memory and it's surprising how well DSM runs on this with one gig of memory with the arm-based processor but what it will add is the previous devices or before this in its series The 218j that 220 J the 216j all of those devices arrive with half a gig of memory 512 Meg now whether it is the cost of memory going up and down whether it is DSM becoming more demanding it's worth highlighting that right now if you're weighing this up against the ds220j that might be going on special offer saving yourself 10 or 20 quid or you're considering upgrading from this or other J series devices before it it's worth remembering that this arrives with twice the memory of other J series 2 base that came before it [Music] next up is worth highlighting there is actually a particular subset of Synology Nas users that are going to find this very attractive is that is those who want an incredibly low footprint Nas now whether that's because you live in a mobile home you live on a houseboat or simply looking for a Nas that has the lowest impact in terms of noise in terms of space and in terms of energy consumption this is pretty much the best you're going to get in a two Bay that still includes a little bit of raid recovery there what do I mean well even though it's got a 60 watt external PSU like the majority of sonology Nazis out there that 60 watt external PSU is there as a theoretical and needed maximum in the event of and very rarely will you go anywhere close in terms of full power consumption on this realistically if you look at our own reported power consumption they rated it uh with a couple of 40b drives inside at 16 Watts active use and just four Watts when the system was in idle then you can roll in with things like low power mode you can run in with quiet mode you can do scheduled on and off you can even do wake on land and all of that would have reported noise level with those two drives inside if you go for lower non-pro drives at 18.2 decibel recorded what I mean is this is an incredibly low footprint now so uneasy low price but you're barely going to notice it when it's running anyway [Music] and lastly and this is something a lot of users would write off on this but I do think it's worth discussing and I alluded to it earlier is support of Synology hybrid raid shr now for those aren't aware solology hybrid raid allows you to mix and match drives it allows you to use um you can go for an existing rate and they don't have to be all the same size drive like a normal raid requires you to do capping you at the smallest available drive now a number of you might say well it's a two Bay you can't even hot swap it like right now with that two-bay device shr doesn't really have much meaning on this two-based system given you can't really swap out drives that easily and with only two drives you're not really taking advantage of the full scope of what shr can be which is when you might have a four a six an eight by device perhaps and you partially populate it and you can add larger drives later you're right shr might not be as appealing on this device when you get it however anyone that's utilized Synology now system for extended period of time have eventually upgraded their system generally unless they want to go completely clean sleep sweep if their drives are running fine and the smart tests still say they're okay people like to continue using those drives now if you've been for this device this little two-bone modest device in an shr and then five seven ten years down the line you want to go for a bigger sonology inasm or something they're still around with everything else and nasta is a thing then in that case you're gonna have a much better and smoother job scaling up your storage if your original drives were in an shr because then you can physically remove those two drives and pop them in a four bay device like this put those two drives in and then this new system which will then migrate your data and update the OSU can carry on all of your Pathways and stuff where you left off but then the shr will allow you to add the bigger drives whereas if this didn't have shr and you had to go with a traditional raids raid one the result would have been that you would have moved these two modest drives out of this modest system into your bigger system later on and be locked in with the way raid won't a traditional raid won't let you use larger drives so the inclusion of shr on this two by although largely overlooked does have its place if you really get into the solology ecosystem and want to upgrade later but perhaps you don't want to go into the solology ecosystem maybe you're not sure let me give you the five reasons why you might want to sit on the fence and go for another Nas or a completely different brand entirely now I'm going to be straight with you the majority of the Five Points I'm going to talk about can all be largely put under the heading of they had to cut corners or you are talking about modesty or to stay within a certain Value Point ultimately the downsides of this for a lot of users are going to be moderately obvious the reason being that there's a reason this is cost effective and value and the entry point or the entry level system but still nonetheless we should really go through them and the first one is expandability on this in terms of memory is non-existent that one gig the minute you're running a lot of operations or you're running a lot of cameras there's no way to upgrade the memory inside this inside there the original memory is soldered to the board underneath that metal panel there which also kind of AIDS as heat dissipation too and the result is that not only can you not expand the storage with an expansion device and you can't install you know anything beyond those two drives but you can't upgrade that memory so over time the more apps you run or as DSM becomes a little beefier and a little hungrier the result is that one gig of memory may end up serving you as a means of losing out in terms of feature and functionality of DSM but just bear that in mind you cannot just solder on a new memory area on there you can't just add a sodium module one gig is all you're gonna get this next point to be fair we're not going to give too much height on this for that but it still arise with one gigabit Ethernet there on the rear now I get it it's an entry level system Synology is never really engaged with um you know 2.5 gigabits net or 5gbe out there but there's still no denying that there are some users that are going to look at the 200 liquor price tag on this give or take and then when you roll in your drives um the the fact that you can only get 109 megabytes per second Network traffic when even the dullest and most domestic level hard drives will give you between 140 or 160 minimum Megs each and you're raiding them together is going to be disheartening the reason I bring it up although we're not going to be too harsh on Synology not including greater than 1GB on a value series system is if you think that is going to be a bottleneck that might be a reason not to go for this and go for something a little beefier there yes there are a 2.5 GBE 2 Bay affordable systems out there not from Synology you might want to look out there but the reason I give Synology a little bit more stick on this despite that lower price tag which normally I'd sign them off on is because they still are not allowing let's find it here the use of upgrades over USB there's still no support of USB to 2.5 g adapters or USB to 5G adapters which at the very least would allow some users to be able to take advantage of those USB ports and add better network connectivity hell they've removed pretty much all of their USB 1GB network adapters that might have allowed you to add a second Lan Port there and maybe take advantage of SMB multi-channel or poor trunking so overall just bear in mind that this value system will limit you to one gigabit Network traffic now for this next point it's worth hopping back over to the laptop here because the ds223j has a really odd position when it comes to hard drive and SSD compatibility now when you do look at the range of supported drives on this and you go to the third party options it's a very early thing you know that kind of stands out to you if you spend even more than 10 seconds looking and that is not only to the hard drives only go as high for third-party drives up to just 14 TB but there is only seven WD drives listed on here and there's only eight Seagate drives listed on here and there's a whopping one of my notes 36 Toshiba drives on here so overall that is not a vast amount of compatible drives with this rolling out the gate now to be fair to Synology you know they have to verify drives it'd be very easy to say this one starter Drive works with all of their systems and not check and then later on if someone gets litigious that could be problematic but still nonetheless that's not a lot of supported hard drives on their compatibility list and for a value series device when you're trying to find a bargain the idea that there's only these um eight Seagate drives and the only these seven WD drives here with the non plus series drives because not all of them are SMR remember that but more it seems really odd to me that it's such a restricted compatibility listing there and if you look at their own drives of course they're listing their own drives from 4 to 6 to 8 to 12 TB there so overall attain hard drive compatibility on ds223j it's a little odd here early doors this may improve over time and it may just be a question of Synology so but surely making a way through verification of more drives later on will have to give them the benefit of the doubt so nonetheless this may annoy you for those of you that are looking at buying this drive and buying your drives at the same time with the potential to for those drives not to be on the official supported compatibility list and staying here on screen it's worth highlighting that you know you may have heard great things about synology's platform and the features that they do offer on there but there's still no avoiding that because this is that arm-based processor and it is a value series device and it is great that they've rolled in a lot of different apps and services a lot of the killer apps are just not going to be there to put that into perspective if we look at the App Center here some of the apps that you are not going to see on the ds223gi ever are ones like active backup a phenomenal application which for many businesses is worth the price of admission as a fully fledged multi-platform single portal overview of your backups in you know across your network Hardware environment there then on top of that you've got things like the virtual machine support there which allows you to take advantage of virtual environments of os's ignore it says repair is because we've updated the DSM 7.2 on this and we're still waiting to update all of the individual apps over time then you've got things such as the range of Maximum cameras in surveillance station with more prosume and Intel power devices here giving you between 25 and 40 cameras were on the value series devices they generally cap out about 12 to 15 cameras then when you look at things like Plex Media Server and even their own native video station application you're not going to have support of Hardware transcoding natively that CPU does have 4K playback and very light conversion support when it comes to Plex Media Server you're going to hit something of a wall overall what I'm saying is if you go for the value series NASDAQ you are going to miss out on certain key and attractive elements in synology's platform because you are going as a value tier and you're not getting the full experience and again we haven't even talked about on DSM 10.2 support of things like write one to read many support one for immutable backups and volume encryption neither of these although system some point two is available on the ds223j are possible on this Nas and finally I alluded to this earlier on but expandability just generally and scalability and upgradability on this Nas is significantly lower in terms of glass ceiling than on most other Nas devices in their portfolio I already mentioned earlier on that this doesn't support hot swapping you can't just in the event of a raid issue you can't just pop a drive out and stick in another one you have to power down the device in its rate degraded state which may some users not a big fan of there another thing it doesn't have as mentioned there is no expansion slot there's no eSATA Port there to attach the Synology dx517 so the two bays it's as big as it's ever going to get and the minute you start maxing out that storage remember you're in that raid one so you're gonna have to gradually replace drives and it's just going to be problematic in a way that expandability and larger Bay numbers are available on some of the other sonology Nest systems there we already talked about the lack of memory upgradability on this but another thing we didn't talk about is this is one of the now decreasing number of Synology now solutions that doesn't have m2mvme Bays on the base so yes it's an arm-based processor so there is an argument you wouldn't be able to capitalize on those and indeed there may not even been the lines available to the CPU and the chipset that would have allow you to really take advantage of m2s but still nonetheless this you just bear in mind that you may have heard great things about some logic caching and indeed M2 nvme storage pools they are not going to be a thing on this this device when you get it out of the box expandability is virtually nil above and beyond just adding larger drives periodically and refreshing the raid later that's all you've got on this and ultimately this value series box at the start as your entry point moving away from the cloud may be very very attractive when you're moving away from Google Drive Dropbox and the like but it's just worth bearing in mind that as soon as you start getting to grips with it as soon as you start really enjoying it that glass ceiling is going to come down pretty darn hard so as I say first entry into synology's ecosystem it's great but if you are looking for a firmer and more established foot into society's ecosystem it might be worth going for a device perhaps a couple of times more expensive but apart from that thank you so much for watching I hope you've enjoyed this video on the should you buy for the Synology ds223j let me know what you guys think in the comments the review it will come I just wanted to get one of the short before you buys out first let me know what you think in the comments should be a link in the description to other videos and articles on this Nas and other Synology Solutions if you're still on the fence about Wichita Hardware solution you need or whether indeed Synology is the brand for you then do use the free apply section the big blue bat on the right hand side of the screen on every now's compare page or use our free community support Forum Arsen as Compares or the Discord where we can answer your questions for you apart from that thank you so much for watching if you're gonna buy from Amazon b h Newegg and the like please use the links in the description to take you there it costs you nothing extra and it helps you support content creators like ask as we get a kickback from anything can I mean anything to you buy it's just me and Eddie here it really helps us out but apart from that thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 45,576

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Id: xiRe2DopPX8

Length: 18min 58sec (1138 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 04 2023