Synology DS220j 6TB 2 Bay Desktop NAS Solution | Installed with 2 x 3TB Western Digital Red Drives

Edit:If you want a NAS for Plex, get a better one than this! Plex will run on this one, but it can be tediously slow (because this NAS doesn't have enough processing power or RAM). My original review is below. I haven't changed my rating, because this is a good NAS, just not so good for Plex!Original Review:This is my first NAS and I bought it solely for use with Plex, so that's what my review is about. I bought the 2 x 10TB Toshiba N300 package.I was in two minds whether to buy this model as when doing research, I kept hearing people say that the lack of RAM (512MB), as well as the fact it's not upgradable, means it's not ideal for Plex use. Based on my experience so far, I would agree with this, however that's not to say Plex won't run. I have been able to install Plex and play my media without any major issues - sometimes it's a bit slow though, and sometimes videos will randomly stop, which is annoying, but most of the time there are no issues (I suspect something else is happening in the background that causes videos to pause - maybe it's the NAS doing something, or maybe it's Plex doing a library scan). Also, bear in mind that I live alone and I am the only one accessing the NAS - if you plan to use it with multiple users (i.e. more than one) accessing Plex at the same time, I imagine it will struggle.However, for me, I thought I may as well take a punt on this model as the price of the enclosure + hard drives was pretty good. If you consider the cost of buying the drives separately, the NAS enclosure itself worked out at about £25, so I thought I may as well buy it as it will be handy to have as a backup (literally) when I upgrade to a more powerful / expensive NAS in the future.I also purchased a Chromecast from Google and paid the £5 one time fee for the Plex iPhone app - I'd highly recommend both as this will allow you to access your content on any TV very easily - I've not experienced any play back issues at all so far.In summary, if you are a single user wanting this for Plex, it's not a bad option. It would be better to buy a more powerful NAS with more (and expandable) RAM, but it does seem to be quite a big price increase for that. So if you don't have big bucks available and want something now, I would recommend this as it works well with Plex and let's be honest, most of the money is in the drives themselves, which are easily transferred to another NAS in the future if needs be.I should also mention that the first NAS Amazon sent out came with two drives that had completely failed. No idea if that was just bad luck, or if something else was to blame, but needless to say it went straight back in exchange for a replacement. Amazon were fairly easy to deal with in that regard, but it was a bit annoying. I also note that Amazon's pricing is very erratic. I paid £530 for the 2 x 10TB Toshiba N300 deal, yet I've seen it increase to as much as £640 for absolutely no apparent reason, only to come back down again the next day. I would be pretty furious if I'd paid that much only to see it reduce the next day.

This is my 5th Synology DS but this one has been confusing to set up. Online guides don’t cover the issue however, using a Mac I’ve got it operational via Finder and after a few weeks now can manage the device with the Synology Assistant or via web interface.

Great. Got the 2 bay version. Stuck it up in the loft where I have a network point and put all my stuff on it.it's a bit noisy to be put anywhere habitable in my opinion. Even if you turn the fan down to minimum, you can still hear the hard drives rattling around like a bag of glass marbles in the corner of your room. Hence why I banished mine up to the loft, and even then I had to place it on foam to drown out the low pitched hum down below the ceiling.Other than that, all good. Now I've got an 8TB cloud in my home that all my devices can connect to.Using my Nvidia Shield as a Plex server for it's progressing power, and the data paths are all pointed to the NAS.One thing that took me a little while to figure out is how to access your shared folders from a Windows PC.Basically once you've created your shared folders on the NAS, you just open a file explorer folder in Windows and enter the address \\YOURserverNAME and click enter. It will ask you for your NAS login, so click the remember me on re-connect and then you will see your shared folders. Right click one of them and select MAP NETWORK DRIVE and then it will stick it in MY COMPUTER on your PC always so you can go straight to it.I just found out that I can actually download files from the internet to it, from my mobile phone in the living room which is kinda cool...

On the surface, this is a pretty great entry model NAS. It will do everything you need if you're after something for your home and don't plan on too much heavy usage. It holds up well streaming 4k movies, but you will notice a performance dip if you do too much while streaming.If you're not overly technical, it can be a bit tricky to set up to back up your files and folders properly, but there are super useful guides on the web that will walk you through how to prevent the two-way sync on folders you don't want all over your network.BUT, the biggest issue by far is that the WD Red version that is less than 12TB comes with SMR drives. WD have been shipping SMR drives out to smaller NAS installations, which aren't good at all for NAS or RAID. They take up to 14 days to resilver, which is far from ideal. In fact, WD are facing a class action law suit for this because it's not shown in the spec sheets... Amazon should make buyers aware of this.If you buy a smaller capacity Synology NAS, avoid the WD Red. Iron Wold doesn't use SMR on smaller sized drives, so consider this option as you will be fuming when you try to replace a drive and it takes 14 days to resilver.WD Red drops the SMR and goes to SMR over 6TB drives i believe, so the 18TB and upwards options are fine for the WD bundles

This product is sufficiently complex to require a user guide otherwise you spend hours of trial and error.

I bought this to replace a failed external drive. I paid more to have the disks installed, but it arrived with the disks inside the case but not installed. And I didn't have a scredriver that fitted the tiny screws.Other than that, with a bit of planning, it was easy to get going. I had to get onto Synology support a few times, partly for advice about which apps to use, but also because of a problem syncing with my laptop. They generally got back to me promptly and were able to sort out my issues.Hopefully, from here on, it will just sit there and work.