Turns your NAS appliance into a Swiss army knife
October 14, 2019

Turns your NAS appliance into a Swiss army knife

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Synology DiskStation

What doesn't DiskStation do? As a comprehensive network-attached-storage operating system, DiskStation offers a plethora of features from File Sharing Services to client OS backup integration (such as Apple's TimeMachine) to Surveillance Software, to Download software. It will even run Docker containers if your hardware appliance will support native virtualization. As a server, it really is a swiss-army knife of functionality. Over time, I've only grown more and more of what it offers.
  • Filesharing - This is an easy one. As it's loaded on a network-attached storage device, DiskStation provides robust file share support, supporting SMB/CIFS, NTFS, and more.
  • Additional package management - DiskStation offers a plethora of add-on packages (most free!) that enable you to customize your DiskStation experience to your liking. I personally like Surveillance Station, Download Station, and git add-ons.
  • Easy to understand administration - DiskStation's administrative console offers easy to understand options that make setting up, configuring, and managing multiple users trivial.
  • While Synology has remained committed to keeping my older NAS device up to date with DiskStation updates, they are starting to make it feel slower than when I first got it. I'm not complaining, almost no one supports 5-year-old devices with current software, but Synology does.
  • As easy as the Administrative console is to use, the Surveillance Station plugin is equally difficult to configure. Surveillance requires more knowledge than I care to invest in for configuring my security cameras to be captured by that package. While I ultimately got it running right, it took multiple Google searches and countless hours of tinkering to make it happen.
  • Diskstation alerts need to be more robust. I find after a time, they just stop working. If I reboot DiskStation or reconfigure it, I start getting alerts again, but sometimes it's not until I've identified a problem that I notice the absence of working alerts.
  • DiskStation has provided an accessible storage solution to our developers for local backup that they can control. No need to contact IT to do anything. This has been a win for IT and our users.
  • DiskStation provides good support in a mixed PC/Mac environment, eliminating the need for multiple solutions. It can act as a file share for both platforms, and as a result, provides ease of access, regardless of what a user is using for their OS.
  • While DiskStation provides quotas per user, I'd also like the ability to set policies - so that business-critical data is getting backed up to Enterprise-focused storage, and not to our local DiskStation. This is partly a people problem but could be addressed by enabling policies that disable code from being stored.
When we decided to look for a nearby storage solution, we briefly considered QNAP NAS. From a technical data sheet point of view, it has complete feature parity to DiskStation. Ultimately, we decided to go with DiskStation because of word of mouth from one of our team members; he had a Synology NAS he used at home and found the experience easy to use and configure. As a result, we went with DiskStation and haven't looked back.
Unfortunately, the one time I've had to reach out to DiskStation support, it did not go well. My NAS appliance wasn't appearing on the network, and no matter what the support team tried, they could not get it back online. Instead of offering to send me a new unit, they told me to go buy a new one - obviously, this was a disappointing response and not very eco-friendly either!

Fortunately, through some internet research of my own, and some ingenuity, I figured out I could restore my NAS to factory settings by removing all the drives and resetting. Only then did I realize I had a bad disk. I had to experiment for a while to figure out which one it was. Once I had done that, though, I was able to get the latest DiskStation loaded back on, no thanks to the DiskStation support crew. If notifications were rock solid, I suspect I would have caught the bad disk before it because an OS problem, but I never received a bad-disk notification.




Do you think Synology DiskStation delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Synology DiskStation's feature set?

Yes

Did Synology DiskStation live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Synology DiskStation go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Synology DiskStation again?

Yes

DiskStation really fills a niche when you're looking to fulfill a need for a small, easily managed server that a typical developer can use and configure without much training. If you need enterprise-class features such as replication or deduplication, you should look elsewhere. However, if you just need a NAS appliance that can act also expose some other nice-to-have functionality, DiskStation is the way to go.