Synology DS923+ 8TB 4 Bay Desktop NAS Solution Review

The Synology DS923+ 8TB 4 Bay Desktop NAS is proving to be a fantastic replacemnent for my TerraMaster F2-210 2-bay which failed recently. My research on Synology devices suggested that users reported high degrees of satisfaction and I'm happy to report that I've also been very happy with this NAS. In fact I think I'd struggle to fault it based on my experience so far (I've had the device approximately one month now).

Here's a few cherry picked features I like about this NAS:

Memory / RAM

One base spec I was keen to improve on was the RAM available to the device. While the 4GB it comes with is plenty for use as a NAS and home media server, I'm a heavy docker user and hope to use this NAS as a light weight server for running non CPU intensive container workloads.

Synology branded RAM is expensive, so following some research I ordered a 16GB SO-DIMM 260-pin 2666 MHz / PC4-21300 chip from ballicom.co.uk, and can confirm that this is working well (Initially it looked like the memory hadn't been registered, but it turned out I hadn't fully clicked the memory into place, after which it worked fine).

AMD Ryzen CPU

The AMD Ryzen chip lacks the onboard graphics that the Intel Celeron processor built into the previous model had, but facilitates up to 32GB of RAM. Since I'd rather the unit waste energy doing video transcoding anyway, and because of my need to use for containerized application workloads the change of processor is a great design choice in my opinion.

Power Options

The DS 923+ has good a good range of power options, including Wake On Lan (I personally opt not to run my NAS 24/7, and so being able to wake it up remotely and have it sleep after periods of inactivity is a big plus for me).

Low Noise

The unit is extremely quiet, and what I do hear is sound made by the HDD drives themselves.

Great Community Support and Documentation

The DSM (Disk Station Manager) OS is easy to navigate such that I didn't need to look up too much regarding set up and maintenance, but where I did, Synology have great documentation, so all of what I needed was directly on Synology's own website.

Ease of Discovery

The system defaults are well set up and adding the DS923+ to my network was really simple.