Synology DiskStation DS920+ NAS
Synology’s popular four-bay NAS gets a long-awaited update. But how significant is it?
Synology’s four-bay DS920+ NAS is the follow-up to 2017’s incredibly popular DS918+. At a glance, not much has changed and the fact it runs the Synology’s constantly updated software means there’s virtually no difference in operation, either. Nonetheless, the improved memory and processor speeds make this a welcome update to Synology’s vast army of enthusiasts and if you’ve been thinking of buying a NAS, this may well be what you’ve been waiting for.
The NAS has four, lockable 3.5-inch drive bays which offer easy, hot-swappable access to what’s inside. There are also two, M.2 2080 NVMe drives for fast caching and increased storage. At the rear is an eSATA port which can be used to connect additional drive bays plus a USB 3 port that can connect storage, a printer or a mobile internet dongle. There are two Gigabit Ethernet ports which will suit most domestic requirements however, SMBs who rely upon these NAS boxes to service multiple users on a LAN may find this limiting. They also mean that the NVMe drives can hit a bottleneck when it comes to post-browser operations. However, they’ll still improve the performance of onboard Virtual Machines and video processing (for surveillance cameras or PLEX videos). It’s relatively silent at 20dBA with most noise coming from your choice of hard drives.
A major attraction of Synology is the plethora of well-featured software which comes licenced with the DiskStation Manager operating system. A vast library of native (and third-party) apps enable each NAS to act as a powerful, hybrid cloud which is a cost-less alternative to the expensive, multi-seat, subscriptions from mainstream players. All bespoke apps have been significantly tweaked over the years to run with excellent memory management.
If all of this makes owning a
NAS sound irredeemably complicated, be assured that the vast Synology community has libraries of how-to videos and instructions on setting-up every type of application.
If you own a DS918+ you’d have to be a major enthusiast to want to upgrade to the DS920+ and new buyers should tarry too: the older model costs $750 compared to the $1,000 DS920+. If you rely on your NAS for business then the 2GHz, quad-core Celeron processor plus 4-8GB DDR4 RAM will make a difference to multi-user performance over the older 1.5GHz 4GB of DDR3, but it’s doubtful domestic users will need the incremental performance boost.
the volume. Bass figures prominently here, no matter what you’re playing, but we came away impressed with how good it was at background tunes when we played some late night jazz at lower volumes while sitting outside at night.
Like any speaker, the Boombox 2 has its tipping point, and we found distortion start to set in around the 80-90% mark. Bear in mind, though, it’s really loud at those volumes, so you probably only need to go that high if you’ve got a lot of people congregating over a larger area.
JBL doesn’t reinvent all that much with this newer iteration of the Boombox, though did manage to change its multi-speaker connectivity and keep it friendly to water. A speaker like this was made for everything to do with being outside and makes for a perfect companion at outdoor parties.
Ted Kritsonis