My review on Synology DiskStation Diskless Attached DS412

This NAS box is a great product. Well-designed interface, easy to get around, but does require a little bit of geek knowledge. This thing can be your DHCP or DNS server or both. If you're not a geek, plan to call one or spend hours on youtube figuring it out. It can be your fileserver for Mac or PC or FTP or even iSCSI LUN. It can do radius or LDAP. Has a bunch of other apps you can download and try (like iTunes server, plex server, mail server, web server, vpn etc etc etc). It does have an application for camera surveillance for one single camera (and you can buy other licenses for additional cameras). Bear in mind that the camera licenses for the surveillance product are around $50 per camera starting with your 2nd camera (first is free), but hopefully synology will get smart and price it more reasonably in the near future. For those that have been using dropbox, cloud station software on this diskstation does a reasonably good job as a dropbox alternative. While the cloud station devices (aka your laptop, your computer, the disk station) are all on the same local area network, synchronization is a bit slower than you would otherwise get on dropbox - but it does the job. Warning- do not buy regular cheapo SATA drives, this thing needs NAS quality SATA drives! Go to's synology.com and check the drive compatibility matrix before you buy SATA drives for this device. Raid-5 or SHR raid both allow you to recover from one drive failure out of four. Since this is a 4-drive box, expect around three drives worth of storage capability. One other note, it does not read Mac HFS drives! Do not expect to attach a Mac drive via USB and be recognizable. For Mac users, if you are moving large chunks of data to your disk station for initial move, you must reformat a usb drive as NTFS on your mac and copy the files over. So plan to buy paragon's NTFS for mac. You can do FAT if the files are small in size and short in name. the plex server - don't expect to copy MKV files and have the disk station be a plex server for MKV files (25GB in size for 1080p/2hrs). If you can compress you HDX 1080p movie files down to about 5GB-8GB per 2-hour video on mp4 or m4v, then you'll be fine using plex on diskstation. One other thing that's cool - you can do static LAG on the gig-e ports of the diskstation to double the ethernet bandwidth to 2Gb/s- but make sure the switch can be configured for LAG first or you'll lose the diskstation's connectivity.
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