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The DiskStation DS214Play ships in a small green and white box – this is a generic box with a product sticker located on top.
Inside is a welcome pack, with regional specific power supply, mounting screws and a ethernet cable.
The DS214Play is a modest design, plain black with the company name engraved into the side panels (this also acts as venting). It is constructed around a metal shell, but the outer materials are all matt plastic. This material is very resilient to finger prints and feels like it could survive some bumps and knocks along the way.
There is no digital display on the unit which means you need to check a browser window to get details, such as remaining storage capacity.
The unit measures 233 x 165 x 108mm and weighs 1.27kg.
Alongside the activity and status indicators is an SD card reader, alongside a ‘C' button, which is basically a data replication feature to the NAS itself.
At the rear is an eSATA port, as well as dual USB 3.0 ports. Synology have not included a secondary Gigabit port, so there is no support for Link Aggregation. A single fan is placed above the ports, shown in the image above.
The front of the DS214Play is easily removed to get access to the two drive bays. The holding clips are plastic and a little fiddly to release the bays.
Fitting a 3.5 inch hard drive is very straightforward and doesn't require any tools. 2.5 inch drives will need to be screwed into the bays. These are also of a plastic construction.
Synology have said that the Intel processor is much faster and will speed up thumbnail processing and can handle 1080p video transcoding.
Wow they really do make a lot of products, hard to know which one to get when you look at their portfolio. this play device seems ideal for apple users at home due to codec issues.