For a couple of years I have been using the Synology DS220+, a two-bay, consumer-level network attached storage (NAS) to keep sprawling data under control. While I recognised there was still a lot to get from the DS220+, I was also curious to see what benefits I could get from moving up to a more powerful, four-bay NAS, the new Synology DS923+.
Visually both the DS220+ and DS923+ are similar, with the obvious difference being that the larger DS923+ can accommodate up to four drives.
Internally, the DS923+ is an upgrade in various fronts. It moves from an Intel Celeron J4025 to a slightly newer and more powerful AMD Ryzen R1600 with a 2.6 GHz base speed and 3.1 GHz bursts. In terms of memory, the DS923+ also allows much more than the DS220+. It comes with a base 4 GB RAM but thanks to having two memory slots you can configure anything up to 32 GB total. In my case I have a second 8 GB memory installed, so I have mine running with 12 GB RAM.
In addition to these changes the DS923+ also has two M.2 slots, allowing you to add two NVMe storage devices, which I will cover a bit later.
You will find the DS923+ comes with two RJ45 1 Gbps Ethernet ports, so you can connect it to two different Ethernet networks for failover support or use Link Aggregation to improve speeds up to 2 Gbps. Link Aggregation requires support from your network switch, which in my case is possible thanks to a managed HPE switch I use at home.
The main advantage of using Link Aggregation here is to be able to support a higher number of concurrent network operations, which positively impact performance if you use the NAS for computer backups on your network (which I do).
It also supports an optional PCIe network upgrade that allows you to upgrade it by adding a single RJ45 Ethernet 10 Gbps port, which I have not tested.
The first test for me was to determine how easy it would be to migrate the 4 TB drives from my current DS220+ to the new DS923+. As it turns out, it’s easy to do and practically risk-free, providing you move and install them in the same order as currently installed on your existing NAS.
Installation is hassle-free, thanks to its no-tools required caddy system. Interesting to note the DS923+ comes with a key (and spare) to lock each caddy, preventing unwanted removal physically.
Obviously simply moving two drives to a new NAS won’t increase storage by itself, so I decided to install a third drive to take advantage of the newly available bays. Making sure to buy a drive of similar capacity and using the Storage Manager I expanded the storage pool.
Since I was using the Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) on my previous NAS I could expand the storage without changing the RAID type. SHR is a clever piece of software that manages the storage pools like RAID but does it in a way that optimises disc utilisation.
Because the original NAS had only two drives the SHR worked like a RAID 1, storing copies of the data in both drives. When a third drive was installed the Storage Manager allowed me to expand the storage pool and automatically started acting like a RAID 5, with my data being stored in two drives and parity data being stored on a third drive.
This means the SHR needs to spend some time spreading the data accordingly between the three drives. In my case this operation took about 18 hours to complete.
While this was happening, the NAS was completely functional, so the actual downtime was basically spent moving the drives across to the new NAS.
My NAS is used to store computer backups (using the Active Backup for Business package and the client installed on all computers in my LAN), Microsoft 365 backup (using Active Backup for Microsoft 365 package). Google Workspace backup (using the Active Backup for Google Workspace package), OneDrive and Google Drive backups (using the Cloud Sync package), a bunch of applications running on Docker and Synology Photos so that about 20,000+ family photos are available (including facial recognition and location tagging).
At this point I thought it would be a good idea to have even more redundancy in the system so I also created a Synology C2 cloud storage account, which I use to backup all this data to the cloud, using the Hyper Backup package (which also supports other cloud providers such as Dropbox, Google Drive, AWS S3 or Backblaze using an S3 compatible bucket).
The backup to Synology C2 was configured to upload all data on my NAS, except the image backups created from our computers. In my case the 500 GB upload took about 24 hours to complete, using a home fibre connection rated at 500 Mbps for uploads. After the full backup is complete, the Hyper Backup will regularly upload updates.
Pretty happy so far, but there’s so much more we can do.
The next step was to improve the IO operations, and the best way to do it is by enabling a read/write cache. For this, I had to use the two NVMe expansion slots.
To start you need to know if there will be any real benefit before you invest some money on NVMe SSDs. To help with this, the Synology Storage Manager package offers SSD Cache Advisor, which collects storage usage data over a set time (minimum of seven days). It then calculates how much read and write cache you need for optimum performance.
In my case I ended up with two Seagate IronWolf 1 TB M.2 SSD, specially designed for NAS usage.
Using these Seagate IronWolf I enabled a 1 TB (redundancy is a requirement) read and write cache, which pretty much doubled the storage performance while achieving a 95% cache hit rate over a week. In a busy setting, such as a small office where multiple users constantly access data from the NAS, the cache can help reduce the physical drive activity, which could negatively affect the overall performance of the network.
One thing that is important for home users though is performance for a particular use case: content streaming. Previous versions of Synology DS920+ used an Intel-based chipset with a built-in GPU. That GPU was able to help transcode video content, which is not available on this AMD-based DS923+ NAS. You can still use the DS923+ for serving Plex streams, but you will need to configure your client devices to consume the stream using its original (“maximum”) remote streaming quality so that transcoding doesn’t consume the NAS resources.
So there you have it. If you are looking at upgrading your home network or busy small-office storage to the next level, the Synology DS923+ is a very capable NAS. Easy to use and manage, with robust backup and synchronisation capabilities, secure storage and plenty of applications (both built-in or available through Docker), it can keep your home or business running for years.
