Synology DS220j

I wanted to utilize a couple of my large HDD as a NAS (again). The older model that I was using wouldn't accept the size drives I wanted to upgrade to and did not want to continue with drives located inside PC, dealing with the various backups, mirroring, and so forth. Nothing in particular critical or sensitive being stored, just wanted easy access from any device in the house. This unit was highly suggested by various sources and reviewed high so figured it would be a shoe in. I am FAR from some super IT pro, but certainly know enough to be dangerous (to myself) and have dealt with various NAS/FreeNAS/sharing units and setups over the years. This unit didn't seem super intuitive to me insofar as setup. First off, make sure your drives are empty or that there is nothing on them you want to keep. The moment you put them inside the unit it is going to format them. It claims some hot swap ability and that it will auto rebuild the RAID/mirror that it boots to on default. It hasn't been my experience but to be fair I basically had to get on and search every single area of settings to see what I was and was not doing (and am getting ahead of myself) The unit goes through a setup wizard, makes you choose a strong password, asks a couple of questions and you are off. Access to it requires that you map a network drive. Clicking on the icon that shows in "network" just takes you to setup page. On default the unit will make you pick a "strong" password and will refuse anything it deems to weak. I utilize an easy password within my LAN (not the log in) that all the shared media folders utilize. I went through the settings and changed what needed to be done in order for it to allow me to set the password I wanted. Setting no password will not work with Windows (as it wants the password). After I got that set and what I thought was fixed...I kept having issues with the NAS logging me out. Right in the middle of access it would be asking me to re-enter credentials that were already saved within Windows. I had to do delete that profile entirely, set it back up again, and finally got that issue resolved. After that I had an issue where once one user was connected others could not connect, would show a "forbidden" message. Finally after several days of asking around, reading each individual setting, changing power settings and Wake On LAN settings I got everything working the way I intended in the first place. As I mention earlier in the review once you put a drive in, even if it's already formatted to the type this unit wants, it formats it. It's default setup is a mirror so one of the drives is being actively written to and then copied to the other. This sounds all fine and secure....well... When I put my first two 4TB drives in the unit erased them, bye bye movie collection. Fine, had it backed up properly. I let the unit do it's format and seemingly am ready to go. The unit is making hella noise and come to find that one of the drives is on it's way out, must have bumped it too hard. The information was already written back to the drives. I take out the bad drive, install a backup and exactly same model drive I had on hand expecting it to mirror, like it said. Nope. Had to rebuild the data a THIRD time. So here, to me, is the catch. Supposedly it's "mirroring" your data. Supposedly it will auto rebuild a swapped disk. It does so in it's little proprietary Linux style format. Nothing other than devices like this can read it. It's worthless to a Windows computer outside this housing....and it DIDN'T auto rebuild. You get this warm and fuzzy thinking you are buying a unit that is backing up and mirroring your data and in reality you are trapping information in a format that won't mean squat to anything else. IF a disk fails it is IMPERATIVE that you back that data up as a precaution before inserting the new disk it's (supposed to) rebuild for you. Well, what if you don't HAVE space anywhere else, because this was supposed to BE your "safe backup"? IMO it's a cool little unit. I would suggest setting it up as one "striped" drive, because the mirror is a lie like the pie. It works well for simple sharing after you bust your rump to get that functionality as a true LAN and not tied up in all the cloud BS it will try to get you to use. For the price it's ok. There aren't a whole lot of compelling items that compete for what this is. It's workable. Most folks are just "going cloud" and letting it do what it wants. Edit - 2025 Just wanted to say that after many years with the above setup just being static, I upgraded it again with larger HDD and also did a firmware update. It was a game changer. All of the settings that seemed to make no sense were made far easier in the UI and it works as I always hoped it was supposed to.

I have the Synology NAS now for about 3 months. It works well for me. Below I listed some pros and cons for Synology from my personal experience. Pros: - Hard drive installation was easy and straight forward. - Initial software setup was easy. - The Synology website has a lot of information on how to setup your synology. So if you do not know to exactly set things up, just google it and you will find the Synology website with information on it. - Helped me a lot and great work to set this information up and to keep it up to date!! - Great mobile phone app support. You can find a lot of mobile phone apps from Synology which work well together with your device. I for example use DS File to upload the pictures on my phone to the Synology NAS. - You have software apps for Synology for a lot of things (more than I need), which is great! - Great support for Timemachine (MacOS) to backup on the Synology hard drive. Works really well despite a hiccup. One time I needed to kill the time machine user on the Synology device since it had 2 sessions at the same time and couldn't do a backup. Worked fine after killing those sessions from my Synology. - Great build in functionality to make your Synology secure (2 factor authentication, encryption, etc.). - You can access your files from the outside world if you want to. Cons: - The indexing of video and photo files is starting right away when you copy it on the NAS. When you copy large amount of photos/videos on it, it will take most of the CPU time. It takes than minutes to log into you Synology drive, but you can pause the indexing for some time. I really hoped that was a support for scheduled indexing (index between like midnight to 6am), but couldn't find it so far. That is probably my biggest complaint. - Antivirus: Not a bit deal in my mind since the info that gets in the NAS was already virus checked in my computer, but you should know that it's not working very well for the following reasons. The antivirus program from Synology does not always work well. I had to install the first virus definition by hand the first time since the antivirus software never finished updating (found that solution on the website and piecing things from other users together). Now its updating just fine most of the time. The scan (according to the antivirus logs) takes from like 2-16 hours for me with my data just being like 400GB (no idea what the virus scanner is actually doing), but it doesn't matter to me when it is done. General caution: - If you never worked with a NAS before I strongly recommend you read up on good practices how to make it as secure as possible. I believe Synology provides that information as well. - Installing this device and setting it up the way I wanted to took me some time. So expect to spend some hours to set it up before considering making it accessible from outside your home network. All in all a great product. The few things I do not like are small compared to the functionality provided by Synology. I think they did a great job with this device!

Realmente es tu propia nube, muy fácil de configurar y de crear tus respaldos, incluso si no estas en la misma red.

Después de probar varios NAS, tengo que decir que este me da muy buenas impresiones, y con un servicio de lujo

Bought this to replace 216play. Build quality wise 216 play was better, housing feels like metal although is plastic, made in Taiwan. This 220J is normal plastic, so feels less premium. No country of origin. But important is working well. Hope it last. My experience HDD fails in 3year or so. The synology fails every 4-5 years. This is my 3rd…

The software to access the NAS is extremely slow and irritating to use. Not the most user friendly product to use. Needs a lot of patience to setup.

Lost a star because of none upgradable RAM and need a screw driver. Bar that, nice bit of kit. Fastest of my 2 other NAS's. Interface is nice.