Synology's entry-level single drive NAS, the DiskStation DS115j, has been soldiering on for quite some time but now a new entry-level single disk model has arrived, the DiskStation DS119j. It sports an updated 64-bit processor, has a hardware encryption engine built in and costs less than £100. The processor in the new DiskStation 119j is a step up from the one in the DS115j. The 32-bit Marvel Armada 370 SOC that powered the DS115j has been replaced by a 64-bit dual core Marvell Armada 3700 88F3720, clocked at the same speed as the 370 - 800MHz. The Armada 3700 also has a hardware encryption engine built in. The DS119j comes with 256MB of memory as standard and if feel you 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 DS119j combines frugal power demands - 5.01W in HDD hibernation and just 10.04W when fully active - with low noise emissions when it's hard at work. Physical Specifications Processor: Marvell Armada 3700 88F3720 (800MHz) dual core Memory: 256MB 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: 1 x 60mm Drive Bays Supported: 1 Maximum hard drive size supported: 14TB Maximum Capacity: 14TB 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 DS119j 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 has a label that has two sections. The section on the left-hand side has front and rear images of the DS-119j with pointers picking out its hardware features. The right hand side of the label has a small spec list of the drive along with a list of what's bundled in with it. One side of the box has a group of icons representing some of the DSM OS features; File Sharing, Anywhere Access, Cloud Synchronization and Multimedia. Under these is a small panel listing what OS the NAS is compatible with; Windows. Mac, Linux, iOS and Android. The other side panel has a list of possible uses for the DS119j; Mobile Support, Surveillance, Backup 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-119j up and running. There's a 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 is 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 DS119j enclosure have the Synology logo etched 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, 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 include 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 DS119j, we used version 6.2.1 (6.2.1-23824) 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. 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 DS119j only has a single disk, this version of Storage Manager has hardly any options to work through. 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 DS119j to your own requirements. The Resource Monitor is an easy to use 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. As with all Synology NAS units, the first part of setting up the DS119j 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. Synology supplied the DS119j along with a 4TB Seagate IronWolf drive (ST4000VN00, 5,900rpm, 64MB cache) so we used that to test the unit. Software: Atto Disk Benchmark. IOMeter. Intel NASPT. ATTO Disk Benchmark 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 quote Sequential throughput speeds for the DS119j at 112.73MB/s for reads and 108.45MB/s for writes. These figures are with a 7,200rpm 6TB Seagate ST6000VN0001 installed in the unit. Our test figures of 110MB/s for reads and 103MB/s are from the 5,900rpm 4TB Seagate IronWolf that Synology supplied with the drive. 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 (aprrox 1.2GB). It tests how the NAS deals with a multitude of small files. The DS119j performs pretty well on the whole in Intel's NASPT benchmark although the score for the Content Creation test is a little on the low side. IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on 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 DS119j had no problems dealing with our backup/restore tests. It took 15 minutes to run the backup test and 17 minutes to run the restore test. 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 DS119j drops 19MB/s writing to the disk and 17MB/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 a 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 types: 100GB data file. 60GB ISO image. 60GB Steam folder: 29,521 files. 50GB Files folder: 28,523 files. 12GB Movie folder: 24 files – mix of Blu-ray and 4K 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 (1.5m pixel) image. BluRay Movie. The DiskStation DS119j tackles our real life file transfer tests without too many problems. We tested the peak power consumption of the 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's easier to monitor what power the device is using during each function. The official power consumption figures for the DS119j are 5.01W in HDD hibernation and 10.04W when being accessed. These figures are with a 1TB WD Red (WD10EFRX) installed in the NAS. The 4TB Seagate IronWolf we used for testing the DS119J may be much bigger in capacity than the WD10EFRX but its average active power rating is a little lower than the WD drive, 4.8W against the 5.7W of the Red drive. It seems like Synology's entry level DiskStation, the DS115j has been around for ever - although it only launched in 2014, that's a long time to wait in NAS land for a successor, but now that successor has arrived in the shape of the DiskStation DS119j. The DiskStation DS119j uses more modern hardware than the DS115j. In place of the 800MHz 32-bit Marvel Armada 370 SOC with an ARM v7 processor that was in the DiskStation DS115j, the DiskStation DS119j uses the more advanced dual-core member of the Armada 3700 family, the 3700 88F3720. Still clocked at 800MHz, the 64-bit Marvell Armada 3700 88F3720 uses two Cortex-A53 ARM v8 processors. The 88F3720 also supports DDR3/3L and DDR4 memory, and in the DS119j Synology has teamed it up with 256MB of DDR3L memory which is soldered onto the motherboard so there's no memory upgrades available. To keep the cost of the DS119j 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 DS119j (at the time of writing) supports drives up to 14TB and the maximum supported volume size has risen from 16TB of the previous DS115j up to 108TB for the new unit. Many people will scoff at the idea of a single bay NAS and think that they are just a glorified external hard drive that connects to the network instead of a USB port etc. After all, with a single disk NAS you have as much data protection as an external drive. That is certainly a drawback, but the DS119j has an ace up its sleeve which makes it much more useful than a basic drive - Synology's DiskStation Manager (DSM) software, which opens a wealth of possible uses for the unit. We found the DiskStation DS119j on Span.com for £98.40 HERE. The cost of the configuration as Synology supplied for this review, with a 4TB Seagate IronWolf drive, is £207.60. Pros DSM OS. Hardware encryption. Well priced. Cons Single disk offers no data protection. KitGuru says: Supporting hard drives up to 14TB, the DiskStation 119j is ideal for people who don't want to bother setting up a RAID array but do want to experience what a NAS can offer. But more than that, the DSM OS makes it an idea tool to use for dedicated jobs on an office or even home network - just remember to back all that data up.