Synology DS920+ Unboxing and Setup Photos

After putting the NAS through a mandatory quarantine period (the poor guy came all the way from Taiwan to the Middle East), the unboxing and reviewing process for the DS920+ I received from Synology last week is finally underway.

Bear in mind, firstly, that I’m a total but unashamed noob when it comes to all things NAS.

My local server deployments have historically consisted of breathing life into old laptops by having them redeployed as staging servers running Ubuntu. A family member’s old laptop once hosted an on-prem CRM install for a (then) tiny startup. It now trades internationally. Ergo don’t diss it — the DIY approach can lead to big things (no proprietary software required).

As to why I’ve never really considered adding an NAS to my network: That’s partially because my needs for storing things locally beyond my desktop could best be described as modest or more honestly be called virtually non-existent.

I don’t game. I don’t do much in the way of video editing. And I’ve always preferred streaming to downloading content (legally of course, ahem).

Additionally, as a technology writer I work on mostly lightweight things like word documents that can be skirted back and forth to the cloud in milliseconds. And — because I think this is the easiest way of achieving cross-platform compatibility with those pesky Windows people — I try to do everything that I can on places like Google Docs. It beats a LibreOffice <-> Word duel any day of the week. In brief: I’m cloud first and not a movie buff.

While that’s true, I have always had one potential need for these things: after experiencing way too many bricked Ubuntu installations over the years (but trust me, I know what I’m talking about!),I nowtake backups very seriouslyObsessively so you might say.But the record lifespan of my current OS (it’s a venerable two years old) is testament to why it’s a good idea. For that reason alone, I have long dreamed of getting round to building a fileserver. But in the meantime, I just made do with sticking a couple of dedicated backup SSDs into my desktop. (Check out my Linux backup documentation on Github if you would like all the details).

The bays with the locking device inserted

This was roughly the status quo in my life until about two weeks ago when the good people at Synology, which is headquartered in Taiwan, came along and decided to show me that the derelict state of my local area network (LAN) needn’t stay that way for any longer.

As one of the relatively few people on this planet both obscure and boring enough to find Linux and backups/data recovery subjects of interest they offered to send me a review unit of their DS920+ NAS (it’s already launched Down Under and this link pegged it at $927 AUS — which is $639 in USD).

Two days later (yes, DHL can really move things that quickly when they want to) I had this beautiful product packaging to admire.

Yes, stuff can move from Taiwan to the Middle East in two days!

Setting up a bidirectional sync with Backblaze B2 in DSM

Because of … you know …. the current health situation (I’ve taken to avoid referring to it by name) I decided to give it five days of rest and relaxation leave in a corner of the apartment. While that happened, I found that my dreams were unexpectedly interrupted by visions of syncing Clonezilla backups over the local network while my Synology beeped back approvingly with its green LED lights. I was getting excited.

After I determined that my desire to try out the device exceeded whatever a reasonable quarantine for a package from Taiwan might be (and bear in mind — Taiwan’s track record with the virus has thus far been rather exemplary) I set about unboxing the hardware.

I decided, at first, to be sheepishly straight-edged about the process and actually read the instruction manual the NAS came with. However, having spent too much time in the company of actual techies, I know that the preferred way of figuring out how to get storage drives into bays is to figure out where the screws align, put them in that way, take a screwdriver to the device, and then hope that you’ve got the connections correctly aligned and not damaged the hardware. If not jiggle it a bit left and right and see if something clicks into place. And in the case of failure, resort to the mother of all troubleshooting resources: Google.com. Thankfully there was no need for need for any diagnostics or mechanical bludgeoning. It worked out of the box.

After two hours spent shoving whatever spare drives I had on hand into bays (ultimately I only found one lowly non-NVMe SSD), checking out Diskstation Manager (DSM) (the embedded server / management console for Diskstation NASs), and configuring several apps that let me do everything from set up two way syncs with my Backblaze B2 buckets to run email servers and even install my favorite open-source CRM (Vtiger CRM). Having completed this process, I can confidently say that I understand why people prefer these to provisioning actual full-fledged servers on their networks.

Here’s Why (I Think) People Like NASs

As mentioned, I never quite ‘got’ the appeal of NASs. And spending a little bit of time on the internet I can see that I was not alone. So let me give you my perspective on the answer to that gnawing question — probably more popular among Linux users — of “why would I get an NAS if I could just build my own server and control everything including the OS and hardware?”

It’s a good question but there are answers.

An NAS is simply a prebuilt server which makes it extremely easy to add more storage (the bays literally slide out — so the skill required is essentially just ensuring that they’re the right way up going in). And it’s designed to work, in Synology’s case, with a proprietary OS, accessed through a web server, that makes it comparatively simple to do things like set up web and email servers.

If you enjoy things like setting up Apache and spending a lot of time in the terminal, then that is probably a bad thing (although you can still SSH into the NAS). If, on the other hand, you want a quick and easy installation process of everything you might want to do on a server — this is a nice gadget to have underneath the TV or into a spare closet that you can repurpose as a local data center.

The hardware aspects aside think about the pain which getting a GUI in an actual server would entail: installing a desktop environment, connecting to the virtual desktop server. In other words: work. The embedded OS makes doing all these things as easy as opening the IP in a browser.

And make no mistake: this guy isn’t only LAN-accessible. Synology has figured out a nice trick to make the NAS remotely accessible without the need for configuring port forwarding — you get a custom URL and can access it from any web browser.

Hardware

In terms of what’s under the hood (although “beneath the bays” might be a more accurate description):

The CPU powering the DS920+ is a relatively modest Intel Celeron J4125 although it’s a step up on what kept the DS918+ ticking.

Likewise the RAM and the power supply are already there. I have no idea where (nor — and this is the point — do I particularly care) and you risk voiding the warranty by making aftermarket alterations to anything other than storage (although NAS Compares has an unofficial Synology NAS upgrade guide).

As I mentioned in the unboxing video, the NAS comes with a simple AC/DC adapter — although Synology studiously included the perfect plug type for my location (my pet peeve is manufacturers sending unearthed Europlugs — Synology had the foresight to send me the perfect connection). Although this is one device that I would definitely want to have hooked up to my trusty UPS rather than have plugged into the wall.

But that’s really it from a hardware perspective.

Out of the box, all you need to worry about is adding storage drives. Speaking of which, there are two NVMe SSD slots on the underside. But if you’re more traditional and can’t quite understand the need for such read/write speeds you can just proceed as I did and slot either 2.5″ or 3.5″ disks into the aforementioned slots which snap out with a delightful click mechanism.

My unglamorous needs, as mentioned, are going to consist of moving full and incremental backups to this over the LAN. So I figured that bog standard SSD would more than do the job.

From a software perspective, the DSM web-based OS lets you do everything — but the device isn’t as locked down as I had expected.

You can still do everything from deploy virtual machines to configure various servers. It’s just that the fulcrum of the device, out of the box, is the proprietary Synology DSM interface.

One cool thing about DSM (because NASs are, after all, simply designed to be network-attached storage devices): it makes it really easy, as you might expect, to configure the various RAID configurations. This is particularly exciting for me as, until very recently, I mistakenly assumed that RAID configurations were something only seen in data centers (nope, you can provision them on desktops too).

The hour being late when I got round to unboxing, I didn’t feel like rustling around my tech cabinet to see whether I could muster up a few spare HDDs to slot in to the bays to keep the SSD company. So instead I provisioned the NAS with the solitary 240GB SSD — which, until recently, had permanently lodging rights in my desktop. I formatted it to ext4 while attached to the NAS (I thought the fact I could do this while still using the web server was impressive)— but DSM was not shy about pointing out to me that my solitary drive could not provide me with the data protection that is the reason RAID arrays exist.

And that was essentially that.

While I had to install a few of the backup apps I intend testing from DSM’s sort of internal marketplace, provisioning the bare fundamentals — by which I mean shared file storage buckets — was incredibly simple. After creating a new user and adding read/write permissions, they were immediately visible on the network both from my desktop running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and from a Windows laptop. Success!

The NAS was immediately found in Ubuntu

That’s essentially the extent of my journey so far.

Forthcoming Synology Linux Backup Adventures

Tomorrow I’ll test SSH-ing into the device and buy a WiFi-to-ethernet bridge so that I don’t have to put up with the annoying humming sound which its fans emit.

I’ve heard that running an rsync sync is the best means of backing up a Linux desktop onto the NAS, but I’m going to see if I can get Clonezilla to write an image to it directly over the LAN — because I love Clonezilla and trust it more than any newfangled backup tool with securing my data.

I’ll also see if there’s some way to set up sync to the NAS with all my Backblaze cloud storage buckets that doesn’t involve adding them one by one ….. which will be difficult, as there are a lot of them to say the last (we’re talking dozens; and please don’t ask me why).

The one negative?

As mentioned, unfortunately the DS920+ is not silent — the fans, whatever they are, are too noisy for my liking.

This was a surprise to me as I had heard that the only noise from NASs come from the hard drives they are typically filled with. I thought that by adding an SSD I would basically make it so but that wasn’t the case. Although bear in mind that I’m sensitive to sound and even though the hum is slight it is definitely audible. This will probably mean that I will be using an ethernet -> WiFi bridge tomorrow to set it up in another room so that I can access its storage bounty without having to stream white noise to not hear its vague din.

Some more product photos below.

All the details on how well this fares for backing up my Linux desktop coming to the internet soon.