Synology DiskStation DS920+ Review

Whether PC/Laptop or smartphone, every user is struggling with storage space. Though these devices come with plenty of storage space, but not enough. The operating system captures a good amount of space and then you need a decent space to manage future OS updates. After these, you rely on external drive to store your data.

To cater the storage challenges of power users and small-to-midsized (SMB) users, Synology introduced DiskStation DS920+. This is four-bay network-attached storage (NAS) device that is easy to expand. The NAS supports various third-party apps, including Synology’s powerful Collaboration Suite, for the ease of use.

Design and Features

The overall built and design is nearly identical to its previous siblings. The front has four front-loading, tool-free drive bays, a USB 3.0 port, a backlit power switch, and five LED indicators for system status and drive activity (one for each drive). At the back, it has two LAN ports, a secondary USB 3.0 port, and an eSATA port.

The Synology DS920+ is equipped with a quad-core 2 GHz Intel Celeron J4125 processor along with 4 GB of DDR4 RAM that can be expanded to 8 GB. The NAS can house four drives of 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch SATA or SSD drives. A total of 64 TB of internal storage can be created with DS920+.

To configure the DS920+, you need to download Synology’s DiskStation Manager (DSM) app. A simple to use operating system that lets you configure drives, monitor NAS health, create shared folders, handle security and download apps.

When you run the DSM for the first time, it appears with icons labelled Control Panel, File Station, Package Center, and Help. You can check the system health CPU and RAM usage using the DSM. You can also download more apps depending upon your requirements. Using the Control Panel, you can create users and assign their rights. Control panel also lets you create shared folders, configure network settings, and block IP addresses.

Easy to setup

Synology DS920+ is quite easy to set up, first install four drives, we added four Seagate Iron Wolf 2 TB drives in each sled. The NAS comes with a LAN and power cable, once drives are installed, connect the NAS the router using LAN cable, then power up the device. Now open a browser on your PC which is connected to the same router, type http://find.synology.com in the address bar.

A utility will immediately look for the device and will install the latest version of DSM. Now you can setup Admin account and set up the drive configurations.

Performance

We connected the NAS to our network router and then after setting up things, we started testing the performance of the DS920+. After finalising the configuration, we gave access to multiple users to test its ability. We used it in a real-world scenario, stored various data on the shared drive, access restrictions to particular users and other settings. It was outstanding in deploying and allocation specific right to the users.

To test file transfer performance, we transferred 5 GB folder with assorted data, containing videos, photos, music files and document files between the NAS and a host PC. It delivered excellent transfer speed of 98.6 MBPS when PC to NAS and 104.8 MBPS when NAS to PC. However, speed can differ depending on your connectivity through the router and the connected drive in the BOX.