Review on High-Performance Synology DS220j Diskless 2-Bay NAS DiskStation with 512MB DDR4 Memory by Alex Prince

UPDATE: I have the following problem. There were times when I noticed a lot of disk activity even though nothing was happening on the network. After a while, the device would not respond to software commands, nor to turning it off with the power button, which then required a power off (not recommended). I did a little research and found a story of people reporting this exact issue with a number of Synology NAS devices, some of which were released six years ago. Not wanting to contact Synology Support, I decided to see if I could diagnose the cause of the issue. Because it turned out that the longer the device is used, the higher the probability of a problem. I scheduled it to periodically stop its various services and start them 10 minutes later. For almost two months, this prevented the problem from reoccurring. This changed two days ago when the problem appeared two days in a row. I'll adjust the period between service restarts, but if that doesn't help I'll find a suitable replacement that won't be Synology. I cannot recommend this product. I needed an affordable tool to back up devices on our network that wouldn't cost me an online backup service for the rest of my life. When I saw that on Prime Day, I took the deal. If you're looking for information on how it works as a media server, or things like that, then this review won't be of interest to you. I only use it to back up files across all our devices. So let's get started. GOOD: The device is physically well designed so adding discs and sealing the case is a breeze. I'm old fashioned so I would have preferred a unified program to enable and configure things but I think as they wanted the hardware to work on Windows, Linux and MAC with a server/client approach in combination with your web browser . was the easiest way. Although using multiple apps is a bit less convenient, it is a reference app that allows you to do the basic settings without much effort. Within a few days I had all the necessary files backed up on the RAID volume, as well as a secondary backup on one of the two USB dual bay SATA stations I connected to the DS220j. It also allowed me to encrypt files and send them to MS OneDrive or Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. So I had a pretty reliable backup system. Keep in mind which of the included applications are used for specific purposes. Give yourself time to get used to things. My advice is to add shortcuts to the applications you need on the page and forget about the main menu. Finally, it saves time. DANGEROUS: Contains many apps that have nothing to do with file backup or even media servers, photo sharing and the like. There are applications that allow you to run a web server or even a mail server. They're pretty rudimentary, but the problem is that they all allow access from the internet, and while there is a firewall application, it's also rudimentary. It gives you the ability to block IP addresses of even entire countries, but it doesn't have access to online IP/domain/network reputation services that can warn you about potential threats. If you don't have a network firewall that offers such functionality, it seems a bit risky. I gave it 4 stars because while I'm concerned about security issues, there are steps you can take to protect your network from them. , after all, supports things very well.