Review on Diskless Synology 💾 DS218j 2-Bay NAS DiskStation by Tim Shah

I was hesitant to buy a local storage device for my home, thinking that with all the cloud services out there, I didn't really need it. I am very happy with this model. It works well and is very easy to set up and use. Failed drives are easy to replace. I was able to download all my old home videos that I had previously re-dubbed to DVD onto this unit. My wife and I can upload all of our digital photos from our smartphones, freeing up storage space on our phones. Memories is a great app for backing up your digital photos. The only downside to this is that I can't use the USB connection to transfer data directly from the phone to the server, it seems to insist on using WiFi. Because I had a lot of photos and videos that needed to be moved, and because the Wi-Fi was slow and quirky, I sometimes moved photos to my laptop and then from my laptop to the NAS. My son also has a Synology NAS (he advised me to buy a NAS for my home). As a result, I was able to share old home videos directly with him by syncing the two devices. Now let's backup each other's important data between two NAS devices. The downside is that there are a few features to consider. Drive (the app equivalent to DropBox or Google Drive) doesn't work that smoothly. Simply storing information on the hard drive doesn't seem to move it to the NAS device. If I mount the NAS as a shared folder, I can store documents in it and they will appear in Drive on any device I add the app to. Maybe my inexperience. Moments are tied to the disc. Once Drive is loaded, the more complex CloudStation Server application cannot be used. Basically, you have to choose one or the other (Drive or Cloudstation). Finally (and this is my fault) this device does not decode film formats. So if you have mixed formats, you need to use an external device to transcode them to MPEG format. I should have done a little more research here, but the workaround is simple: use your computer with open source software, transcode it, and just save the transcoded files. I can play videos directly from my Samsung Smart TV or Apple. TV (You must use your phone to play videos on Apple TV, but once you do, your phone is no longer needed. This is similar to how Chromcast works). This also works on Roku, although Roku says the video app isn't fully compatible and won't be available after late 2018. I'm amazed at how much data you can store on this device. I bought two 4 terabyte NAS drives and everything I put on them takes up less than a terabyte of storage!