Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I’ve attached a few pics, nothing to outrageous here, it’s a 4 bay NAS (that can be expanded to 9 drives). Kind of a light weight feel to it, plastic frame and hard drive housings, but later when it’s loaded with drives the weight savings was appreciated. Along with drives, I also installed a M2 NVMe drive for cache set up. Later when setting it up you see that a solo cache SSD maximizes the read speed, to get the best performance for read and write tasks you need to have 2 SSDs for caching. I’ll need to do some testing and research here. I’m sure someone else has figured it out already! I unboxed in 2 minutes, mounted drives into the slots took about 5 minutes and booted in 3 minutes (not fully set up but access to the web utility pretty quickly for first boot). You'll be prompted to create an account and install DiskStation Manager. SO, after you order, go ahead and download your PDFs and the DS Manager from Synology and have it ready to go. The DS Manager setup had a 10 minute countdown but on my unit it took 5 minutes. The admin website interface is a very nice desktop OS like navigation. You can install apps from Package Center, there is a Control Panel and a File Navigator inside the ‘shell’ to start you off. But first you’ll go to Storage Manager to set up your drives. I got this more for media storage, so to max use my new drives I went with Raid 5. It took about 12 hours to run the Parity Consistency check. But I checked after about 2 hours and at that time I had space available and usable, so I copied a few things over to get started. This may have been the case from the start. Overall, set up was easy, I’m not a novice but not a super expert. There were guides and menus along the way to help folks new to setting up a NAS and the Synology boards are very active for research. I’ll add an update later if I have anything significant regarding performance or experience, but so far it does what it says and am happy with the unit.