Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Great NAS that I used to replace my Windows 10 workstation for Backup, Plex, and video surveillance duties. Setup was quick, however I did my homework and googled instructions for the tasks I needed accomplished ahead of time. The setup wizard only walks you thru the basic settings of the unit and doesn’t even touch on most of the features that make this unit the power house that it is. Make a list of things you want your NAS to do, check the UTubes for a good guide and you won’t be disappointed. One thing I noticed is that this unit only comes with 4gb of ram. Again this is enough for “Basic” use. You will want to upgrade to at least the max “supported” ram of 8gb to do anything with video surveillance or VM’s. You can upgrade this box to 20gb total using non-supported modules. Just keep in mind that is “not supported” and synology will be unable to assist you with any problems while such modules are installed. I used this 920+ for about 2 weeks with the base 4gg. Performance was fine for basic file sharing and single backup operations. Use of the Plex server caused a bit of lagging if other operations were also going on. I then upgraded my unit with another 4gb for a total of 8gb (max supported by Synology tech support). Plex was a lot more happier with this configuration and I was able to stream regardless of any backup tasks going on. This is when I threw in a wrench and tried to do VMs as well. Depending on the OS you are using, Windows in particular just won’t be happy with anything less then 4gb assigned to the VM. That being said, with a max of 8 gb on the NAS I was only able to field one VM and even then I was back to stuttering streams etc. To solve my issue I went outside the boundaries of supported specs and upgraded my 920+ to 20gb total by using a single 16gb dimm. Let me tell you, this thing handles everything I need it to now. I may need to upgrade to a stronger unit CPU wise down the line but for what this unit is targeted at it handled it 100%. Just be sure to upgrade the memory for what your trying to do.