Exterior

The white plastic enclosure is indicative of the product's mainstream category. You would have to invest a lot more than the $155 the DS214se costs to get an enclosure out of aluminum or high-quality plastic. At the face of the NAS's chassis are four status LED indicators and the on/off button, but there are unfortunately no USB ports on the same side since both have been installed into the rear. A nice feature of convenience, a USB port in the front would have been great since this NAS is mostly meant for use at home.


Synology punched its logo into one of two sides.


Most of the space in the rear is occupied by a plastic fan grill. Below it are the DC input socket, the Ethernet port, both USB 2.0 ports, and a Kensington Security Slot.


A front and rear scheme of the NAS and a description of its LED indicators.


The bottom of the NAS features pretty large rubber feet and a small label with the model number, power input specifications, and two arrows that explain how the chassis is opened and closed.


We opened the NAS before starting our tests to replace its HDDs with those we use in every NAS review, which ensures that the results in this review are compatible with all our previous test results. As you can see, the DS214se 2200 comes two WD20EZRX Green HDDs for a combined capacity of 4TB, which is not bad for a home NAS unless you want to store all of your blu-ray movies on the NAS. Doing so would either take a larger NAS or 2x 5TB HDDs.