Synology DS211J Diskless System DiskStation 2-bay NAS Server for Small Office and Home Use

Pros: Very easy to set up and get running. Also comes with a number of great apps that can be downloaded from App/Google store to make your server that much more fun to own. Great customer service from their company as well.

Cons: When I first purchased this server there was no way to stream my videos off it to a phone or tablet. This was fixed for my iPad first, but now there is software for all of my Google products as well.

Other Thoughts: When they first released the app for the iPad I couldn't stream it from my iPad to my TV using my adapter cables. I sent an email into the company and they responded very quickly and gave me suggestion of adapters that would fix the problem. Before I could even get to the store to buy one of these new adapters there were new versions of their apps released that fixed the issue. Great software...Great product...Great company

Pros: Use this with one 2TB drive in it to mirror my 2TB drive that's in my PC (used for data). Lots of features (most of which I don't use) and the GUI webpage is AWESOME.

Cons: None

Pros: Ease of setup
Set and forget

Cons: Airport runway lights on the front

Pros: Synology makes one great NAS! Had this for almost a year now and I have not had a single problem. I love the web interface. In fact, it has only gotten better since they released the new DSM 4.0 (Disk Station Manager). Hard drive installation is very easy and also supports 3TB drives.

I would definitely buy again!

Cons: None. I got exactly what I payed for and more!

Other Thoughts: Just a heads up, this model does not support WOL (Wake-on-LAN). Not a big deal for me.

Pros: Very easy to configure, using 2 Seagate ST2000DM001 2TB's in RAID configuration, one step below their Enterprise drives. It mounted and mirrored both with ease and speed that stunned me. I was backing up data on it in 2 hours and tinkering with the addons the DSM OS came with. The new DSM unleashed a whole new world for the system, adding on new features and products like cloud-based storage and an internal AV system. I can get used to the flexibility of this pocket server.

Quiet! The fan runs at high speed and I cannot hear it. With 2TB Seagates, they run in the 110F range so I have to keep that fan running full time.

Cons: Problems with some USB printers not integrating with the NAS. Not their fault, that lies with the printer manufacturers for building proprietary interfaces and drivers and not sticking with industry standards.

A bit of a problem getting access to the drives and doing swapouts. This is a Cold Swap NAS, so you have to shut it down, unbolt and open up the unit and then unbolt the drive, pull it and then reassemble the unit just to fire it back up.

If you are new to this, get one of the Hot Swap NAS's from them. It'll cost a bit more, but it'll be easier to manage swaps and administer.

Pros: Vault like trustworthyness

Cons: Extrenely SSSLLLOOOWWW, no joke. It's very slow, and I know the bottle neck is not my network. Computer to computer is fast but this thing is slow. So slow I cannot even use it as an Itunes server with Apple tv.

Other Thoughts: Simple to use and defaults to linux raid which is similar to raid 1, so the drives are mirrored and you can have two different sized drives which is strange and I won't do. But like I said it's slow. I mean wow. It took me five days to load 900GB data on it from an external I had, and they were running day and night.

Pros: I've had this thing for almost a year and it continues to surprise me with its features. The interfaces are outstanding: I was impressed with the standard web interface from the first day, and just in the past month discovered the ssh/telnet (ash shell) and mobile web interfaces. More features are built-in than I'll ever use and even more are downloadable, such as LDAP server functionality. Not a single glitch or complaint in almost a year of ownership.

Cons: It's white.

Pros: So far, so good. Picked this item up to serve out media to my myriad of desktop computers and Android devices scattered about the house. Admin system is entirely web based and works great on Chromium, a huge plus for Linux users. The little monitor application does come in a Linux version, as well.

Transfer speeds are very good. Works just fine with SMB, NFS, FTP and web-based interfaces for loading and retrieving files.

Feature set is through the roof. The DSM OS is phenomenally easy to use; uses a simple desktop metaphor.

Cons: Not really a 'con', but a first-time novice setting up a device like this could get lost in the amazing amount of features, settings, and options available.

Go slow, and the built-in help system is excellent at guiding you to exactly the options you need.

Other Thoughts: I purchased a 3TiB drive to start off with, and intend to drop in another at a later date.

Drive format and check takes a very, very long time on such a large capacity drive (fully expected). Also, so you don't have problems later the TOP slot (farthest away from the device's electronic board) is 'volume 1', and the DSM OS will take ~200MiB of space on that drive.

Pros: A good stable basic NAS device. Good user friendly UI.. has many bells and whistles, lot of hype

Cons: Most JMicron based external USB 3.0 drives/enclosures don't work as you expect. Majority of the usb 3.0 drives are based on this chipset, and this NAS device just fails. the tech support confirmed that they dont know how to fix the problem nor do they have roadmap or plan to fix it.

This is a major pain if you plan to backup the NAS data onto an external USB 3.0 HDD.

Further if you have large photo collection, and if you want to use the features advertised like photo station etc..,,.. you will be in for a BIG disappointment. Some stupid guy thought it would be cool to create thumbnails (3 sets) for every image. and every thumbnail creation takes about 2-5 mins! So, if you have a photo collection of thousands of photos (very normal for a photography enthusiast), it just sucks... and when its doing this, the CPU utilization is at 100%! -- which impact other services. Further, there is no way to speed up or control the process (only stop or start or pause). It takes years to complet

Other Thoughts: wish i had not purchased this. Support sucks - they dont have a road map to fix the problems. you are on your own if there is a problem.

Pros: RAID redundancy
Nice software/interface
Can install some third party services as well (sabnzbd, sick beard)

Cons: Slightly pricey