I was uncertain about getting a local storage device for my home thinking I did not really need one with all the cloud services that are out there. Having gotten this model I am very pleased with it. It works well, its very simple to set up and use. It is easy to swap out failed disks. I have managed to upload all of my old home movies that I had earlier transcribed to DVD's onto this device. My wife an I are able to upload all of our digital photos from our smartphones freeing up space on our phones. Memories is a great app for the task of backing up your digital photo's. Only downside to it is that I cannot seem to use a USB connection to move data from the phone to the server directly, it seems to insist on using the WiFi. As I had many photo's and video's to move across and because Wifi was slow and quirky on occasion I would up moving the photos to my laptop and then from my laptop to the NAS. My son also has a Synology NAS (he suggested that I get a NAS for my home). As a result I was able to share the old home video's with him directly by syncing the two devices. We now backup each others critical data between the two NAS devices.
The downside is that there are a few quirks to consider. Drive (synologies equivalent app to DropBox or Google drive) does not seem to work as seamlessly. Simply storing info into drive does not seem to move it to the NAS device. If I mount the NAS as a shared folder I can save documents to it and then they appear in Drive on any device I add the app to. Could be my inexperience. Moments is tied to Drive. Once Drive is loaded the more sophisticated CloudStation Server app cannot be used. Basically you have to choose one or the other (Drive or Cloudstation).
Lastly (and this is my fault), this unit does not transcribe movie formats. So if you have a mix of formats you will need to use an external device to recode them in to a MPEG format. Here I should have done a little more research, but the workaround is simple, use your computer, using open source software and recode it and just store the recoded files.
I am able to run video directly from my Samsung Smart TV, or an Apple TV (you need to use your phone to push the video to start on Apple TV, but once you do this your phone is no longer needed. This is similar to how Chromcast seems to work). It also works on Roku, although Roku is giving a message that the video app is not fully compatible and will no longer be available after the end of 2018.
I am amazed how much data you can store on this device. I purchased two 4 Terabyte NAS disks, and with everything I placed on it am using less then a terabyte of storage!
| RAM | 512 MB DDR4 |
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