Synology DiskStation DS716+II
ANOTHER TOO-EXPENSIVE (BUT OTHERWISE REALLY GREAT) NAS.
TARGETED MORE AT small businesses than consumers (though the firmware is identical), the price of the Synology is rather on the high side. Like the Asustor AS6202T, it offers a lot of power for its $600, and it was the fastest NAS we tested, but there’s not really enough here to justify the price premium. Indeed, it only comes with 2GB of memory, two camera licences and fewer ports (and no HDMI), so the Asustor is better value right now. Like the Asustor, it does have an eSATA port, which can be used to expand the number of drives it supports.
That said, it’s still a great NAS, perfect for someone who has a use for the power offered by the quad-core processor. People looking to use virtualisation or Docker, or to have live transcoding up to 4K, or run extensive surveillance management will find its power useful. On the latter score, the Synology is particularly excellent, with what is, in our view, the best surveillance software available for NASes.
Like the boxes from QNAP and Asustor, Synology wears its Linuxness out in the open, with a huge array of apps and services available for the platform, and a management interface very much reminiscent of a desktop OS (windows/panes and tabs and all). The array of tools here easily rivals QNAP, covering syncing apps, cloud backup, IP telephony, virtualisation, backup, content management and web publishing, streaming servers, email services, web caching, VPN and security services, wikis, customer relationship management and antivirus. The first-party tools on offer are excellent as well, most notably the aforementioned Surveillance Station and a Google Docs-alike that lets you create documents and spreadsheets in a web browser and have them stored on the NAS.