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The Synology DiskStation DS214Play is a very attractively designed NAS which will appeal to the wide audience of media centric users. The move to Intel's snappy Evansport chip will be welcomed, especially considering the native hardware transcoding capabilities.
We tested Synology's claims of 1080p video transcoding and found that it worked as advertised, without a hitch. Playback is smooth and will be a wonderful companion for devices without native support for specific codecs. We had only one media file recorded in H.264 which failed to play properly across the DS214 Play.
Synology are keen to point out the DS214 Play's quick processing of photo thumbnails (through Photo Station) and our tests highlight that it certainly couldn't be faulted.
Performance across our network was commendable, rating at over 100 MB/s when reading large single files and dropping to around 78 MB/s when writing.
The DS214Play also ships with a high level of connectivity, incorporating USB 3.0, eSATA and SD card slots, useful if you frequently use multiple storage devices.
We rate the DS214Play highly, it is a very capable and responsive NAS featuring one of the most versatile and intuitive operating systems available. The only real downside is the overall cost of ownership, which can extend to over £500 by the time you add two 4TB hard drives. You can pick up the bare bones DS214 Play for around £287 inc vat right now.
Pros:
- responsive.
- fantastic operating system.
- solid network performance.
- well built.
- USB 3.0 ports.
Cons:
- expensive.
Kitguru says: The DS214 Play is an excellent NAS system, but it is expensive.
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.