Synology DiskStation DS414Slim 3TB (4 x 750GB WD Red) 4 Bay Desktop NAS

I've had this, my first NAS, for a few months and it's taken a little getting used to but it serves exactly the purpose I bought it for - to serve music for the Sonos - different music in different rooms. I can now switch the computer off at night!Easy to setup and run - Synology keep it up to date with regular updates.

Wish I had paid a little extra and got the DS414 as the slim is just a little under powered. It will take 9 days to finish indexing my photos and creating thumbnails for them. This only has a single 1.3ghz processor, whereas the the DS414 has a dual core. Having said that, I get great rates out of the dual LAN ports (linked) and it is tiny.

We bought this simply to store music, videos and photos centrally but because Synology have built in every conceivable use for this box (email server, firewall, surveillance system etc etc), doing the simple stuff is near-impossible.The manual is well written and quite readable until you actually try to do something such as creating a backup, adding an application or trying to manage content. Then it becomes an IT nightmare. Support have been OK on email but I have never managed to get them on the phone after many attempts because they are always "experiencing very high call volumes" I can understand why.Based on many hours trying to make it work I recommend you only buy one of these if you have infinite patience and a degree in computer engineering neither of which I have. I'll probably send it back and go for something easier to use.

I would echo the review above; I'm when it works it is fine, but i had severe problems with the fan and the support was mediocre. I was sent a replacement fan with no instructions how to fit it and it is definitely not a case of taking out the old one and dropping the new one in to place. However, The fault was with the logic board to the fan so even when i worked out how to fit a replacement fan: there was still a fault. I am going to replace it with something else so i can at least use my disks. I know a lot of happy Synology users, but sadly I am not one of them.

The plug adapter supplied (APD-GB) with this Synology NAS does not fit the power unit (Edac EA1024HR-120).

Easy to install and use!I am on the go, and can access it securely over the Internet, when I need.Good product.

Set up in a snap; intuitive to navigate, configure, and "leave be" in the background; fairly quiet.

I like this unit a lot - it's tiny, sips power and is extremely quiet. The capacity is not great - i'm using 4 1 TB WD Red with Synology's software in raid5 so i get about 2.7 TB space, but it works fine as a home file-server and first tier backup solution. I attached it to my home network and serve up code and media from it. The media speed is not amazing, but streaming works fine. It just worked out of the box with no headaches, i forget it's there which is really the most important thing i was looking for. Also the size means i can carry the whole thing with meThat said if you're technical and you don't mind setting up software raid on linux and opening up your case to put in the drives etc. for this price you can just buy 2 4+ TB 3.5" Hdds and mirror them.

Love the setup and ease of use. Personal cloud is proving to be an excellent surprise.

I am disappointed with this as I expected to have more flexibility. Previously, I have been using a Raspberry Pi with a single USB HDD as my NAS (running Raspbian) and I was expecting the same level of flexibility (it's probably my fault for expecting to be able to do more than is advertised). In particular, I cannot sync my data to an encrypted shared folder, I cannot use bash for scripts (I got around this by installing optware, but got a security warning, and I had to compile some tools from source as the repo wasn't the right architecture), I cannot figure out, for the love of everything that is holy, how to make it send me email when it runs a scheduled task (so easy with any Linux distro), etc. The GUI is nice, but doesn't excuse the missing functionality.The worst is when it blew away my /root directory on restart (it might have been an automated upgrade) and I lost my backup script to transfer files to a remote server (non-Synology). No software should EVER delete user files automatically. (I now backup my scripts, but I didn't do it then since I was still working on them.)This brand was strongly recommended by a family member, but he is not technical.To summarize, if you know what you are doing, do it yourself.