Synology DS416Play NAS

So I thought I’d treat myself after the ‘interesting’ time I had at the end of the year and bought myself a NAS (Network Addressable Storage) device – think a huge hard disk that can be plugged in to the network.

Install

This was simply a case of shoving in some disks that I had laying about the office, connecting to my network and firing the thing up.

I simply had to find the NAS on the network then to bring up the config page. This in turn made the installation pretty straightforward.

After a period the NAS had created a nice little storage system for all my music, photos and movies.

Features

There are too many for this simple blog post to mention!

• Want your own secure cloud to host your files – check
• Want to backup your system on to a fault tolerant backup device? – yup
• Want to play your media from a variety of devices, including streaming over the Internet? – that too!

The product page on the Synology website gives a great overview of what this little thing can do – have a look here: Synology DS416Play 

There are about 4 models of this box:

• DS416 – The base model
• DS416Play – This one is tailored to media use and has more power to change the media format as required
• DS416j – This one appears to be a slightly lower spec that the others; A budget version perhaps?
• DS416Slim – This version will only take 2.5″ drives, but has a much smaller form factor.

Review

So far I’m really impressed!

This little box now has 3x the storage space I needed (I’ve already filled ⅓ of it with existing files). It’s holding all my media and backups of important files from my PCs.

Allowing me access via my phone and the Internet means I can access anything on the NAS from pretty much anywhere. Great if I’m on a long journey and want to watch something, or need to view an important document when I’m away.

The fact that it is fault tolerant is also a massive boon. as it means that I can not worry about hardware failure. Just out of interest I pulled one of the drives out whilst it was running (simulating a drive failure), because I wanted to see what happens. The system beeped a lot, sent me a mail to say it had happened, and told me what to do to fix it. GREAT!

Shoving the drive back in and taking the appropriate steps quickly brought the system back. The files were all fully intact, and accessible both whilst the system had a drive missing, and whilst it rebuilt.

It also seems to be quite fast on the network, though I’ve not done any performance testing, the shared drive I have set up is instantly accessible, and the HTPC (Home Theatre PC) I have connected has absolutely no problems finding and playing the media on it.

What a great little box! It’s also fairly future proof as I can expand the storage space as I need.

To summarise – I’m really impressed! 10/10