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Synology DS210J NAS Review

// December 4th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Technical Know-It-All

Recently, my trusty TVIX 6500 pulled a stunt and overheated my movie and media collection (and fried my 1TB HDD with it). Should have seen it coming (and to think of it, I work in the Enterprise Storage industry). Everytime I saw a RAID 1/0 NAS unit at Harvey Norman, Sim Lim or Funan, I kept telling myself to not spend the money, “I can live without it”.

Finally I bit the bullet and went shopping for NAS unit that did RAID 1/0. As you might have already known, there are like heaps and heaps and heaps of NAS units out there. I was pretty set on getting the Vantec external USB drive which did RAID 1/0 (but without the NAS feature), until I came about a store that sold the Synology DS210J. I have read about it, and I knew it was pricey, but like any techie, I was curious. So no surprise, I bought it and fitted 2 x 1.5TB drives in it.

I’m always a firm believer that “price do not lie” and while it was slightly pricier that the others, I wanted to give it a go anyhow.

I wasn’t too impressed at first because I had some issues setting it up using my Mac, then I dug out my rusty Windows box and finally got it initialised. I felt it was kinda silly given that it required me to go to the Synology website to download the latest OS for the NAS given it wasn’t preinstalled.

Got that done, and wall-lah… I’m moving whats left of my music and media collection on to it. Didn’t have too much time fidgeting around with it for over a month but slowly I learnt more and more about it, and I must say, it is a very very good buy! I don’t say that too often but I’m truly impressed and happy with it. I am now running all the features on it, that I initially thought was a “good to have”.

If you are contemplating on getting it, trust me its well worth it!