Hands on: Synology Diskstation DS223 review
This review first appeared in issue 358 PC Professional Edition.
DS223 is almost at the bottom Synology’s huge NAS series, Only the single-slot DS124 and the more basic two-slot DS223j models sit below it. As such, its specs aren’t particularly clear, with only two SATA drive bays and no NVMe slots. There is 2GB Memory It’s onboard and cannot be upgraded, and all processing is done by a low-end quad-core Realtek CPU clocked at 1.7GHz. Perhaps just as importantly, this NAS only has a 1GbE network port, It immediately puts it at a disadvantage compared to 2.5GbE devices when it comes to fast file services.
Despite this, the DS223 is designed and manufactured with Synology’s usual quality. Pull open the front panel, and its two drive cages slide in and out smoothly—they’re tool-free for 3.5-inch disks, but you’ll need to screw the 2.5-inch units into place. We mounted two 4TB Synology disks, opened the NAS, and connected to its web interface to create a RAID1 array and format it using the Btrfs file system.
While other NAS manufacturers continue to improve their software, Synology remains the master. Its DiskStation Manager (DSM) operating system A near-perfect balance between functionality and ease of use. Storage Manager makes creation and management intuitive storage Pools and volumes, while all network, user and other settings are centralized in the control panel.
You can enhance and add functionality to the DS223 via Package Center, which at the time of our review offered 107 apps covering a range of multimedia, backup, Business and communications roles. However, this NAS drive’s modest power means it might struggle to run multiple demanding applications simultaneously.
Regardless, this NAS didn’t perform well in our tests, even compared to other devices that are limited to 1GbE interfaces. In ATTO Disk Benchmark, it is about 20% slower than other Synology NAS drives for 4KB file sizes and about 10% slower for 16KB files. Although it caught up when moving 2MB files, it still managed only 111MB/sec write speeds and 113MB/sec read speeds – about the maximum speed possible over Gigabit Ethernet. Surprisingly, however, the DS223 is quite competitive when writing files from A. Windows 11 PC.
We like the simplicity and relative ease of use of this NAS drive, but it’s significantly more expensive than QNAP’s TS-233. It’s faster, but if speed is important we recommend spending more on a 2.5GbE alternative, e.g. QNAP TS-264.
