Synology DS920+ 24TB 4 Bay Desktop NAS Solution, installed with 4 x 6TB Western Digital Red Plus Drives

This is a great NAS from a company with a solid reputation and great support organisation.Storage devices are as important as the main PC in any computing environment that has grown to more than a couple of PCs and devices. Easy of use and reliability are key for on-going satisfaction.Remember - digital data can both last forever and be gone in a milli-second. The difference is backups and reliable storage devices.Some things I found out along the set up journey:Use SMB and not AFp for modern Macs.TImeMachine the mainstay of Mac based backups can be used with with NAS. Shared folders must have the "discoverable by bonjour" over SMB set on.When first setting up using bfs be sure to a put in all the drives that will be used. I started with two drives then added two more but it took the device about 12 hours each to weave the later drives into the existing configuration. This is a result of having to redo the on disk data redundancy layout for the added drives.Use the same size drives if possible - I have 4 * 7TB drives that because of the redundancy scheme this provides 21 TB of storage and 1 drive failure redundancy. Use proper NAS drives available from WD or Toshiba for best longevity.Adding 2 * 1TB cache M1 ssd sticks helps performance when the load ramps up but I do suspect that write through to disk happens. Use gigabit wired networking not wifi for moving larger amounts of data. I was getting reliably about 100Mbytes/second writing from a MacBook Pro with ssd drive over a wired connection. Time machine is a bit slower but not much.I was stuck for a while getting "Note enough space" messages on both Mac systems that were using the device. After a very pleasant interaction with support they found a quota setting on the user name was being correctly enforced. Case opened and closed in the same day.You can move data three main way between a Mac and the device :Up/down load using the File Station software accessed via a web browser,Mount a shared folder and use the finder,Mount a shared folder and use the command line in terminal.Use Time Machine for backups.The disk manager software on the NAS has many option and can be extended with extra software. The fine grained controls over users and data access are great. This model has a Celeron processor and I suspect that the virtual machine experience may not be great. However for long term NAS usage lower power consumption is preferred.Let's talk about the noise. In a silent office you can hear the device but it's not unpleasant. Being quieter than a coffee machine or someone tapping on a mobile phone. I imagine the NAS case as a holding place for data chipmunks so the gentle activity noise is reassuring. Some extra sound dampening would be good though esp. when the drives are spinning up. The device drive activity is not predictable when using Time Machine or multiple shared folders.Overall a great device and worthwhile addition to my computer community.

I purchased this as a media player and for holding my photos after a session, I know nothing about Linux or how a NAS works. I did watch several videos on youtube and configured the device very easily.I installed a single 14tb Toshiba NAS drive then over 3 months bought another 4, 2 for my NAS and 2 for my DASThe difference between a DAS and NAS - DAS is Direct Attached Storage and is constantly connected to your computer like a hard drive or USB stick.A NAS is Network Attached Storage, this is connected to your router and accessed via your laptop or desktop pc via a URL. I have mine configured to SHR using 3 discs, if one fails the drive is replaced and the discs automatically copy the data to the new disk.I regularly backup from my NAS to my DAS and use this as a backup medium using free software called FreeFileSyncI have all my movies and TV series ripped to it and watch them through Jellyfin along with all my photos when out and about.We recently went to the Lake District and I connected my laptop up via Ethernet as it's faster than wifi, streamed a movie via Jellyfin to the TV. Since then I have installed TailScale which is a VPN to make it more secure and watch movies through this application from anywhere using any device. After taking 1000's of photos each day I would upload them back to the NAS which did take some time but upon getting home no messing about copying files etcThis took a bit of working out but eventually got there.I just wish I'd have bought one of these devices years ago, the software which comes with this Synology is perfect. Really polished off and makes it a doddle to use and set up

All good and as expected from a Synology NAS device, easy to use, easy to setup and breadth of features for novice to pro user.Two things I noticed were, if you setup a file transfer (for example to backup or transfer from an existing NAS by setting up as a remote folder to copy from, to the device), when the web portal times out or requires you to sign in again, the file transfer window disappears, you can tell the transfer is still in place by checking the resource monitor which shows CPU/LAN and Volume activity, however no way of getting the transfer window back ( unless you setup a dummy transfer , at which point it will show all transfers, you can then cancel the dummy transfer, a little annoying but hopefully only have to deal with on the rare occasion).Now the most annoying, there is no sound insulation on the device, probably not an issue if you are ussing SSD or smaller mechanical HDs at around the 10TB mark, however with the newer larger sizes of 18TB etc, the sound is frustrating on power up, seek and transfer. There are links online to try to reduce the sound but these do seem quite amateur and dont provide ample resolution.Think about device placement if the sound issue is an issue, which it most definitely will be for a lot of people.