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The Synology DiskStation DS214 is a feature rich 2-bay NAS device featuring the latest addition of the highly-acclaimed Disk Manager Operating System.
For the general user, the DS214 will allow you to store all your photos and videos on one device and then to be able to access and stream them from any device on your network. For the more technically minded, the DS214 can act as a business server, hosting your website and serving emails while performing all of your companies backups.
The device itself is the refinement of many years development. The 2-bay configuration allows for a large amount of storage, but with the DS214 offering a Synology Hybrid Raid, you get fast speeds with the added security of a Raid 1 configuration.
While our speeds didn't quite hit the claimed Synology reference results the bandwidth is unlikely to disappoint the target audience. The Dual-Core ARM CPU clocked at just over 1.0 GHz seemed more than enough to cope with all the networking demands we could throw at it, including streaming large videos to our laptop and tablet, as well as transferring a large number of files at the same time.
The device is fully compatible with Linux, Windows and Mac operating systems. Not only that, it can be connected to a MAC and configured to work as a Time Backup Capsule or to automatically synchronise to cloud-storage applications.
The equivalent start menu and task bar give you easy access to the most commonly used parts of the device, and the control panel gives you quick access to every configuration setting. The desktop even features several ‘widgets' which give you live information on disk and CPU usage, for instance. Overall, we found the latest update to be intuitive and very user friendly.
The Disk Manager OS V4.3 might not look much different to its predecessors but they have improved several areas, including streaming to mobile phones and other devices. They have also improved the Cloud Station feature which now has a much larger maximum file size of 10 GB.
Synology are at the top of their game in terms of Network Attached Storage, and this DS214 device reinforces that. Synology have confirmed the price will be around £215 inc vat.
Pros
- Easy to set-up
- Great flexibility with storage
- Plenty of processing power and RAM
- Great Operating System
- Lots of apps/packages
- Good integration with mobile devices
Cons
- Doesn't have built-in Wi-Fi like DS213 air.
Kitguru says: Another impressive device from Synology, with very positive improvements to the DSM OS.
I think Synology Hybrid Raid is in this configuration the same as RAID 1, it does not add anything extra. Synology Hybrid Raid is handy three disks or more, if not all the disks have the same capacity. If you have for instance two disks of 1 TB and two of 2 TB than you would have raid array of three times 1 TB (minus the spare disk). 1 TB of the 2 TB disks would not be used. With Synology Hybrid Raid you can create a extra RAID 1 array of this room.