Introduction

We would like to thank Synology for supplying the review sample.

According to their website, Synology is a company dedicated to taking full advantage of the latest technologies in order to provide businesses and home users with reliable and affordable ways to centralize data storage, simplify backup, share files across different platforms and operating systems. Indeed this company is specialized into making Network Attached Storage devices and is considered among the key players in this industry. Synology's products are interesting to everyone from the plain home users to large business administrators.

In this review we are going to take a detailed look at their DS412+ NAS server which addresses mostly the SMB users and also a portion of the enthusiast home users that want a rich-featured and strong NAS. The DS412+ is equipped with a dual-core Atom processor running at 2.13 GHz and has 1 GB DDR3 RAM installed. It can take up to four HDDs and its max internal capacity reaches 16 TB (if 4x 4 TB HDDs are used). Also it features two Gigabit ports that support Link Aggregation (LACP) and it also has two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 and one eSATA.

One of the strongest points of this NAS, and of all Synology products, is the DSM (DiskStation Manager) operating system which offers a windowed graphical interface and combines enhanced usability with high performance. If you want to take a look at it you can run this live demo (it isn't available all the time) that Synology includes on their site. Through this demo you will get a good impression of the newest DMS 4 and its capabilities. From the first look it resembles Microsoft Windows, so even inexperienced users will find their way around it.