A 1 BAY NAS??? Synology DS120j Review
For those that don’t know, a NAS is a Network Attached Storage device, where, in its simplest form, it is a hard drive connected to your local network so that any PC on that network can access the files on it, unlike a USB drive where only the device it’s connected too can access it. More recently though, NAS devices have gotten a whole lot smarter and more functional, so much so they now act a lot more like home servers than just file storage.
They can offer features like Plex media server, a great way to stream your movie and TV show collection to any device, be it your TV or your phone, even when you are away, or things like web development tools, should you want to host a website from your NAS too. One of the key and defining features of a NAS though, is its redundancy. This means it has at least 2 drives that duplicate the files you store on it, so that if one drive fails, you don’t lose any data.
One of the brands that offers these is Synology, and they have a pretty decent lineup from full on enterprise gear, all the way to the beginner home user, like this one. This is the DS120J, a £100, one bay NAS. Now, since this is a one bay NAS, this has no redundancy, no way to backup your files, should the drive you put in it die. That’s not ideal, since drives do fail. Backblaze, a cloud storage provider, regularly publishes numbers of its drive failures from its datacentres, which can show hundreds of drive failures per quarter, albeit with over 100,000 drives, and around 500 failures, but still, they can and do fail.
Now with that said, this NAS clearly isn’t for the home power user, I imagine its placed just above a standard USB enclosure, and for the price, it’s not exactly a terrible option. It Is driveless though, just to make it clear, you’ll need to buy a drive separately to this to use it, anything up to 16TB, unlike options from people like WD with their “MyCloud” which come with drives inside, actually for just £20 more than this you can get a 4TB MyCloud which is about right for what a home user would need. Those do have less functionality, you can’t run anything directly, only supported apps like Plex, but still a good £80 or so cheaper when you include the harddrive.
While the DS120j does have more features available to it, including a full app store with both first and third party apps, including like I mentioned stuff like Plex and web development and hosting tools, it’s low power dual core CPU gets pretty stressed with any sort of usage, even something fairly basic like copying a file can see it’s usage max out at 100%, and it’s just 500MB of RAM sits near constantly at 50% usage, without any apps running.
The long and short of that is you won’t have a great time running much on this, it’s CPU isn’t enough to handle on the fly transcoding from apps like plex, and while you can run web servers from it, it’ll be incredibly slow and the lack of redundancy means it’s really not recommended.
While I see what Synology are getting at with this, as a true “beginner” NAS, it’s lack of power and at least two bays make it a pretty hard thing for me to recommend. If you want a network attached storage device for a true “beginner”, something like the WD MyCloud Home is probably a better bet, and if you want a NAS that can run plex well and securely store your files, get a 2 bay or bigger NAS, even from synology themselves. The OS is pretty similar to people like QNAP and Asustor, in that it’s decently featured, has a good app suite, and has most of the features you would expect, so on a more competent machine, it’d get a good recommendation from me.
Sadly though, I can’t wholly recommend this one. It’s an interesting gap in the market they’ve filled with it, but it’s not one I think needed filling. With that said, I would love to hear what you think in the comments below. Is this something you would pick up, and if so let me know why too.
Want one? Amazon: https://techteamgb.co.uk/ds120j
Backblaze report: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-q2-2019/
Products shown provided by: Synology
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