The latest addition to Synology's popular j range of entry-level home use DiskStation NAS units is the single-bay DS120j, powered by a dual-core processor. For less than £100, is this a NAS worth buying? The processor in the new DiskStation 120j is the same 64-bit dual-core Marvell Armada 3700 88F3720, clocked at 800MHz that powered its predecessor, the DiskStation DS119j. But while the processor might have stayed the same, the DS120J gets a memory upgrade with twice the amount, 512MB, compared to the 256MB of the DS119J of DDR3L. If you feel that you still need a bit more poke from the memory department, sadly you are out of luck as you can’t add to the system’s memory. The DiskStation DS120j combines frugal power demands – 4.86W in HDD hibernation and just 9.81W when fully active, very slightly down from the DS119j – with low noise emissions when it’s hard at work. Physical Specifications Processor: Marvell Armada 3700 88F3720 (800MHz) dual-core Memory: 512MB DDR3L Gigabit Ethernet Ports: 1 Rear panel connectors: 2 x USB 2.0, 1 x RJ45 Front panel connectors: none RAID support: N/A Cooling: Active - 1 x 60mm Drive Bays Supported: 1 Maximum hard drive size supported: 16TB Maximum Capacity: 16TB Maximum single volume size: 108TB Internal File System support: EXT4 Dimensions (D x W x H): 166 x 71 x 224mm. Weight: 0.7kg. The DiskStation DS120j comes in a compact box with a small but clear image of the unit on the front. Under the image, there are a couple of lines of text describing some of the features of the unit; Dual-core CPU, quiet and energy-efficient, anywhere access and that it uses Synology’s DSM software. The rear of the box just has a small spec list and box contents list tucked away in the bottom left-hand corner. One side of the box has a group of icons representing some of the DSM OS features; File Sharing, Anywhere Access and Cloud Synchronization. The other side panel has a list of possible uses for the DS120j; Multimedia, Mobile Support and Data Security. The box bundle for the drive doesn’t have much in it, but it’s everything you need to get the DS-120j up and running. There’s an EDAC EA1024PR 36W power adapter, a decent quality LAN cable, hard drive mounting screws, enclosure screws (out of the box the enclosure doesn’t have these fixed in place) and a Quick Installation Guide. The Synology DiskStation DS119j uses a two-part design in a glossy white ABS plastic, with the white finish only broken by a dark grey vertical panel on the front of the unit, the back panel and its black rubber feet. It’s this grey panel that holds the power button and three indicator LEDs; Status, LAN and Disk Activity. The rear panel of the NAS is dominated by the grill for the 60mm cooling fan. The fan itself is a YS Tech FD126015LL which has a Sintetico bearing and a maximum spin speed of 3,100rpm. It has an airflow rating of 15.9CFM and a quoted noise level of 22.5dB(A). Under the grill sit all the ports; two USB 2.0 (vertically mounted) and a 1GbE Ethernet port. To the left of these is a Kensington Security Slot. Both side panels of the DiskStation DS120j enclosure have the Synology logo cut into them which not only looks good, also helps with keeping the internals cool. To get to the drive bay you simply slide the two sections of the NAS apart. If in doubt about how to do so, there is a little diagram on the sticker on the base of the unit which shows which way to move it. Straight out of the box the two fixing screws (one at the top and one at the base of the rear panel) aren’t in place but Synology includes them in the box bundle. Fitting the hard drive isn’t a tool-free exercise as the drive is held in place by six screws. To test the DiskStation DS120j, we used version 6.2.2 (6.2.2-24922 update 4) of Synology’s DSM (DiskStation Manager) OS. DSM has a graphically rich interface with all the major features of the OS clearly listed. Synology updates it at regular intervals to add more features and apps. The basic start page just lists four items; Package Center, Control Panel, File Station and DSM help. Clicking on the left-hand tab at the top opens a window with more advanced menu choices than the basic one. Clicking on the furthest right-hand icon at the top of the window opens the System Health and Resource Monitor widgets. The plus sign on the widget window allows other resources to be displayed including current users, File Change log and different tasks. On the top bar is the shortcut for the admin panel which has five options on it; Personal, Restart, Shutdown, About and Logout. There’s a choice of control panels: Basic displays the features most people will want to get to grips with while the Advanced option offers plenty of scope for those that want to delve deeper into the system to take advantage of all the features the software offers. At the heart of DSM is Storage Manager. Storage Manager looks after RAID setups, volume creation and all other disk management duties. Obviously, as the DS120j only has a single disk, this version of Storage Manager has hardly any options to work through. Synology also supports Seagate's IronWolf Health Management features for Seagate's range of NAS oriented hard drives. File Station is a multi-platform file manager supporting Windows, Mac and Linux PCs as well as Android, iOS and Window Phone mobile devices. With it, you can access and share your files on the DiskStation from anywhere. By using Dropbox, Box, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive mounted to File Station you can access remote data in the same way as locally stored files etc. Synology Universal Search is a search tool that includes multimedia files and apps and offers previews of metadata and contents of files with just a mouse click. Package Center is where you’ll find all the add-in apps and with well over 130 apps and counting in it already you should be able to customise the DS120j to your own requirements. The Resource Monitor is an easy to use comprehensive tool to keep an eye on the DiskStation’s resources. With it you can monitor CPU usage, memory usage, disk utilisation and network flow in real-time or historically. Helping to keep the NAS safe is Security Advisor. As you might have guessed from the name, Security Advisor scans the NAS providing detailed reports on any security problems it finds and lists any actions that might be needed to be taken. So it’s quick and easy to find out where and what’s needed to correct any errors. DSM also has a comprehensive help feature with access to video tutorials, tutorials and FAQs. As with all Synology NAS units, the first part of setting up the DS120j involves going to http://find.synology.com which launches Web Assistant. This app searches for all DiskStations on the network so you can begin the install. If this method fails to find the NAS, the App has a link to the Synology Download Center where you can download Synology Assistant to your PC to search again for the NAS. Once the NAS is found, the first window of the DSM setup wizard appears. Pressing install (there’s also a manual install option to install a downloaded instance of DSM) automatically downloads the latest version of DSM and starts installing it after reminding you that any data on the hard disk will be deleted. After the basic install has finished, the NAS is restarted and next up comes the setting up of the NAS account management, where you assign a server name, admin user name and password. The next window is where the DSM update settings are set. Next, you can set up Quick Connect (remote access to the DiskStation) or skip it and set it up later as you can with the install of Synology’s recommended packages; Moments (photo and video storage), Video, Audio and Download Stations and Media Servers as well as Hyper Backup, and that’s the setup complete. To test the DS120J we used a single WD 6TB Red drive (WD60EFRX, 5,400rpm class, 64MB cache). Software: Atto Disk Benchmark. IOMeter. Intel NASPT. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. Synology's official Sequential throughput figures for the DS120j (fitted with a Seagate ST6000VN0001 6TB drive) are 112.69MB/s for reads and 106.99MB/s for writes. Using the ATTO benchmark we could confirm speeds and even squeezed a little more write performance out of the unit using a single 6TB WD Red drive (WD60EFRX). Intel’s NASPT (NAS Performance Toolkit ) is a benchmark tool designed to enable direct measurement of home network-attached storage (NAS) performance. NASPT uses a set of real-world workload traces (high definition video playback and recording, video rendering/content creation and office productivity) gathered from typical digital home applications to emulate the behaviour of an actual application. We’ve used some of the video and office apps results to highlight a NAS device’s performance. HD Video Playback This trace represents the playback of a 1.3GB HD video file at 720p using Windows Media Player. The files are accessed sequentially with 256kB user level reads. 4x HD Playback This trace is built from four copies of the Video Playback test with around 11% sequential accesses. HD Video Record Trace writes an 720p MPEG-2 video file to the NAS. The single 1.6GB file is written sequentially using 256kB accesses. HD Playback and Record Tests the NAS with simultaneous reads and writes of a 1GB HD Video file in the 720p format. Content Creation This trace simulates the creation of a video file using both video and photo editing software using a mix of file types and sizes. 90% of the operations are writes to the NAS with around 40% of these being sequential. Office Productivity A trace of typical workday operations. 2.8GB of data made up of 600 files of varying lengths is divided equally between read and writes. 80% of the accesses are sequential. Photo Album This simulates the opening and viewing of 169 photos (approx 1.2GB). It tests how the NAS deals with a multitude of small files. Considering the speed of the processor and the size of the installed memory, the DS120j performs pretty well in Intel’s NASPT benchmark, although it does have a real struggle with the demands of the Content Creation test, as its 9.1MB/s result shows. IOMeter is another open-source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on a hard drive and solid-state drive technology. We set IOmeter up (as shown above) to test both backup and restore performance on a 100GB partition. Synology’s DiskStation DS120j had no problems dealing with our backup/restore tests. The extra memory installed in the new model shows its advantage when it comes to the write performance when compared to the previous DS119J. An integrated hardware encryption engine in an entry-level NAS is very good to see. It works reasonably well at reducing the loss in performance when dealing with encrypted data. The DS120j drops just 7MB/s writing to the disk and 10MB/s when in read mode. To test real-life file/folder performance we use a number of different file/folder combinations to test the read and write performance of the NAS device. Using the FastCopy utility to get an MB/s and time taken for each transfer, the data is written from and read back to a 240GB SSD. We use the following file/folder types: 100GB data file. 60GB iso image. 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files. 50GB File folder – 28,523 files. 21GB 8K Movie demos. 12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files). 11GB 4K Raw Movie Clips (8 MP4V files). 10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of png, raw and jpeg images). 10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files). 5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo. Blu-ray movie. The DiskStation DS120j tackles our real life file transfer tests without too many problems. We tested the peak power consumption of a NAS at the wall during a run of CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2 as this version of the benchmark runs the read and write benchmark suites separately so it is easier to monitor what power the device is using during each function. The official power consumption figures for the DS120j are 4.68W in HDD hibernation and 9.81W when being accessed. These figures are with a 1TB WD Red (WD10EFRX) installed in the NAS. The 6TB WD Red we used for testing the DS120J has slightly higher power ratings (Read/Write 5.3W, Idle 3.4W) than the smaller drive, as you can see when looking at our power consumption chart. While it a long time for the DiskStation DS119j to appear as the successor to the DS115j, the Synology DS120j has arrived in a much shorter time frame to take over from its predecessor. The DiskStation DS120j uses the same dual-core 64-bit Marvell Armada 3700 88F3720 (dual two Cortex-A53 ARM v8 processors) as the DS119j but has twice the amount of DDR3L memory than the previous unit, with 512MB compared to 256MB. The memory is soldered onto the motherboard so there are no memory upgrades available. Additionally, the power consumption ratings for the DS120j are a little lower than the DS119j; 9.81W compared to 10.04W for access and 4.68W down from 5.01W for HDD hibernation. To keep the cost of the DS120j down there are no flashy USB 3.0 or 3.1 ports, just a couple of plain old USB 2.0 connectors on the rear panel. The DS120j (at the time of writing) supports drives up to 16TB and the maximum supported single volume size is up to 108TB. While many will consider a single bay NAS nothing more than a glorified external hard drive using a network link rather than something like USB, the DS120j does have a very useful ace up its sleeve which makes it much more than a basic external drive – Synology’s DiskStation Manager (DSM) software, which opens a wealth of possible uses for the unit. But the most important thing to remember is, this is a single drive unit so, there is no form of data protection should the disk start to fail, so backing up any data on the DS120j is a must to keep it safe. We found the Synology DiskStation DS120J for £98.40 (inc VAT) on Span.com HERE. Pros DSM OS. Hardware encryption. Well priced. Cons Single disk offers no data protection. Only USB 2.0 ports. KitGuru says: Supporting hard drives up to 16TB (Seagate's IronWolf, IronWolf Pro and SkyHawkAl are the only 16TB drives listed on the compatibility page at the time of writing), the DiskStation DS120j is an ideal first step along the NAS route for those who don't want to bother setting up a RAID array. But more than that, thanks to the DSM OS, it is an ideal tool to use for dedicated jobs such as data backup on an office or even home network – just remember to back up all that data at regular intervals.