Hands on: Synology Diskstation DS423+ review
This review first appeared in issue 358 PC Professional Edition.
Synology’s DiskStation DS423+ is a home and small office NAS that offers four SATA drive bays and supports up to 72TB of storage. Equipped with Celeron J4125 processor and 2GB memory Memory, The two-bay DS224+ is specified similarly. Unfortunately this extends to dual gigabit Ethernet port, This looks like a misstep when many competitors now offer 2.5GbE. Synology isn’t overly generous when it comes to other ports, either. You won’t find HDMI here, and there are only two USB-A 3.2 ports – and they’re slower Gen 1 5Gbits/sec.
The DS423+ does have a trick, the two shapes NVMe SSD slot. The drives within can be configured as cache for hard disk volumes, used to create flash storage pools, or split between two roles. However, a single SSD does not provide data redundancy, so if you want to speed up disk writes and reads, you will need to use two slots for caching.
This is one of the simplest network storage device We’ve tested it on the setup. Its lockable tray can be used with 3.5-inch disks without tools. Accessing its NVMe slot is also faster and easier than normal – you just flip the case over, open two small covers, and snap the drive in. You don’t even need tools to access the memory expansion slots.
We initially configured the NAS with four 1TB disks configured as a RAID5 array. While Synology, like other manufacturers, is generally pretty lenient about which hard drive brand is right for you, this doesn’t apply to NVM drives. The DS423+ happily uses two non-approved 1TB WD Black drives as disk cache, but you can only use approved SSDs to create storage pools. At the time of our review, there were only four approved SSDs on the compatibility list: They’re all made by Synology and come in 400GB or 800GB capacities, so flash volumes with data redundancy are limited to a maximum capacity of 800GB.
With or without disk cache, this isn’t a particularly fast NAS. It closely matched other Gigabit Ethernet devices in the ATTO disk benchmark, achieving peak transfer rates of 110MB/sec (write) and 113MB/sec (read). It scored 348 on the PCMark 10 data drive benchmark and achieved 59MB/sec write speeds and 46MB/sec read speeds on our 11GB Windows file copy test. We retested it with two large WD disks, but its performance was basically unchanged.
To be fair, disk caching becomes more efficient over time, and our benchmarks didn’t particularly show these benefits. It’s also worth noting that port bonding (where the NAS balances the load between two Ethernet ports) will help the DS423+ provide greater throughput in a multi-user setup. Even so, no user will see Data transfer The speed is above the 113MB/sec Gigabit Ethernet limit, which puts this NAS at a disadvantage compared to 2.5GbE competitors such as QNAP’s TS-464.
That’s a shame, because managing a Synology NAS box is easy. DSM successfully combines user-friendliness with rich functionality covering networking, Safety and convenient features like QuickConnect, which allows you to access your NAS remotely. You can add additional functionality through the Package Center, which offers 107 apps at the time of this writing.
Highlights include powerful third-party applications like Plex Media Center, WordPress, and various developer tools, as well as Synology’s own software, which tends to focus on business needs. Examples include Surveillance Station, Synology Mail Server and even the Synology Office suite. There are also tools like Synology High Availability, which allows you to use a second NAS to provide failover if the active server fails.
In most respects, the DS423+ is an excellent product for a small business, and if speed isn’t a major issue, it’s a good choice. However, with only a 1GbE network interface and no expansion slots for upgrades, it can become a bottleneck for growing businesses, especially those that need to back up or process large amounts of data. If this may be you, we recommend increasing your budget to get the Synology DS923+ for upgradeability or better specs Nimbustor 4 Gen2 by Asustor.
