Introduction

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



Today's NAS servers can also play a major role in a surveillance system setup and aren't solely there for a ton of safe storage capacity or their multimedia capabilities. More and more users are interested in remotely monitoring their homes, workplaces, etc., and having immediate access to the corresponding footage without having any major storage limitations as is usually the case with cloud storage solutions is becoming more and more important. The easiest way to achieve this is by utilizing a NAS with a number of IP cameras that cover your space, one that includes HDDs of high reliability and capacity. We want to, firstly, explore the surveillance capabilities a budget NAS like the Synology DS416j can offer and will, secondly, take a look at the beta version of Synology's new Surveillance Station 8 since it introduces many new features, including a fully featured native client.

Synology says the Surveillance Station client to have been designed to fully exploit the PC system's computational power, which allows you to watch more video streams on the same monitor. The new native client and web version of the Surveillance Station beta supports the H.265 codec which only needs a third of the network bandwidth when watching live views and recordings, as compared to the H.264 codec. This is a major improvement since it not only reduces bandwidth utilization but lowers storage consumption. The Surveillance Station client also comes in a portable version to better allow users to manage deployment.