As Synology arrives, I say goodbye to my WD My Book NAS. Definitely time for something new for home data storage.

Back in 2011, I bought my first Network Attached Storage at Costco, a 3TB WD My Book Live. Over twelve years, it has served me well, sort of. I was able to back-up all my home computers, as well as stream videos to our televisions. But my main use was a shared, common folder so I could access my projects from any computer in the house.

However, WD discontinues updates in 2015, and in recent years, serious concerns were raised about the lack of security on these devices. In addition, network performance slowed dramatically. Sometimes I needed many minutes of waiting to access a file. Time for a change.

One of my sons, who works in IT, recommended Synology or QNAP as reasonably priced, modern alternatives. But boy, these things looked expensive compared to my original WD NAS. Also, I thought the were pretty complicated and perhaps over-complicated. Since Synology arrives with DiskStation Manager, I studied that operating system. At first, I was overwhelmed.

So, there is tons of information online about these devices and how to set them up. Sticker price or feature shock? Get over it.

I bought a Synology DS223j 2-bay NAS, as well as two 4 TB WD Red Plus drives at Memory Express here in Calgary. Total cost around CDN $500. I now have a huge RAID NAS running smoothly on my LAN.

Synology Arrives with Bells and Whistles

My new NAS proved remarkably easy to build, learn and set-up. Installing the disks is simple. Finding the device on the network and installing DiskStation Manager 7.2 equally so. I will cover my set-up process in a future post.

Right now, I am good to go with secure storage for archives, media and shared folders for all our home computers. I use basic user accounts for access on the PC’s, and reserve the administrator password for use only when needed.

In addition, I can plug in a large external USB 3 hard drive for backing up the NAS in case that is ever needed. Well done, Synology. Your DSM 7.2 is a joy to use for a first-time user.