Synology 274860 Nas Ds423 4-bay Diskstation [diskless] Retail

Still getting used to the admin interface, but it went together smoothly. Used the drives from a dying Drobo and though it reformatted the drives (as expected) it did so with no fuss. It's quieter than the Drobo, runs cooler and is better designed internally. The Drobo had the lower HDD directly above the processor, which cooked that drive and killed it within 6 months. This unit has excellent air flow and all 4 drives run cool. Speed is better than the Drobo as well, averaging 60-70 mb/s transferring Photoshop files or Camera Raw stuff on cat6 wire, bumping to 100+ for documents and more 'fluffy' files .

its easy to use but extremely slow for raid built and copy fom system.

I won't describe this perfect little Synology NAS. We're using it in a pro setup with about 30 remote users. Fast and flawless with 2x 8To NAS Seagates.

This NAS is more like a highly capable and responsive server than just some box with a couple of hard drives in it. I was really impressed with the search speed. It's almost instantaneous! There is just no comparison to my old WD MyCloud Mirror. I used to sit and watch the hour glass spin and spin while I waited for it to find a file I knew was there. The search on the Synology NAS delivers the results really fast! I'm still learning more about it every day. I like the fact that it has two ethernet ports so if one port goes down, it's still going to keep working. I have two IronWolf 8Tb drives installed right now and I plan to install two 12 TB drives at some point in the future. It looks like it's going to be a fairly easy task.

I also have a ds923+ and I really like it. I really wanted to get the DS418 for the same price as this 423 because it had the better chassis but the price skyrocketed for some reason, so I got this one figuring it's newer anyway. I am pretty bummed about this one because you have to unscrew the back panel, take the chassis off, use real screws to attach the HDDs to the trays, and the put everything back together. That said, the rest is pretty much the same as my DS923+. The DSM appears to be exactly the same and it works great and when managing it via the web portal, I can't see any real difference. Setup was a breeze but it did seem to take a littler longer than my 923+. Obviously that one is a little beefier but I hope I don't see tremendous slowdowns going forward. I have two cameras recording locally 24x7 on this and wish I had 4 but I can't bring myself to pay the outrageous cost of adding two more licenses ($60 each). I am hoping for a sale or price reduction on the surveillance center licenses but I won't hold my breath.