SYNOLOGY DS723+ NAS Mini-Review
Network Attached Storage solutions
This review was NOT sponsered
DISCOVERY
My nearly 10 year old NAS in the office was on its last legs and needed to
be replaced. I read various reviews online and determiend that the NAS units from Synology had the
features that would work the best for my needs. Synology has both home and business models ranging
from 2 bay to 24 and beyond. In my case, I'm more interested in features and operational speed than
capacity. The Synology DSM723+ won the selection.
INSTALLATION
The equipment hookup is very simple. Just connect one or both of the
ethernet jacks to your network. Optionally you can install a 10GB NIC for faster transfer speeds. For
starters I installed a pair of 4TB drives that I had on hand and cofigured the NAS for simple mirroring.
Eventually the plan is to replace these larger drives in the future. A single 1 TB Samsung NVME drive
was installed as a cache drive to improve performance. There is also a slot for a second NVME if
desired.
UPDATE: Installing a pair of 12tb Seagate Ironwolf Pro drives now gets a consistent
237mb/s over 2.5g Ethernet. These drives have a larger cache and it seems to eliminate the fluctuating
transfer speeds.
ETHERNET NETWORK CONNECTIVITY
This NAS unit can be hooked up to the network in
multiple ways and I have tried all of them.
#1 A single 1 Gig ethernet cable. (Standard connection)
#2 A bonded pair of 1 Gig ethernet cables (Provides a very steady consistent speed and
redundancy.)
#3 a single 2.5 Gig ethernet cable. (Faster but the speed varies more)
#4 Combinations of the choices above.
UPDATE: Installing a pair of 12tb Seagate
Ironwolf Pro drives now gets a consistent 237mb/s over 2.5g Ethernet. These drives have a larger cache
and it seems to eliminate the fluctuating transfer speeds. The original WD Red 4TB drives were the
bottleneck.
MEMORY UPGRADES
A nice feature of a Synology NAS is that it can be easilly upgraded.
One of the first things would be to install more memory. It comes with 2G of Dual Rank ECC RAM standard
but is expandable to 32. Just be careful that the new RAM is compatible with the NAS. The Synology
website says it has to be Synology branded (expensive) memory but that just isn't true. However, Dual
rank memory is a MUST.
PLEX APP (IN USE)
This NAS is capabable of running a Plex media server and does it
quite well. It's a single click installation but you will need to configure Plex itself which is a topic
for another article.
SYNOLOGY DOCKER CONTAINER MANAGER APP (IN USE)
Synology has a custom version of
Docker that will allow a user to virtualize any of hundreds of applications. I successfully used it to
run a Pi-Hole. Docker is a single click installation but you will need to configure. Please
reference the Docker and
Pi-Hole sections found on
this page for separate mini-reviews of these apps.
IPERF3 APP (REMOVED)
This simple app runs under Synology Docker Container manager
and is used to monitor the performance of the NAS. It has the capability to monitor CPU usage,
network bandwidth, and memory usage in real time. It is somewhat similar to using the performance
monitor within Windows. It's something that you would only use for occaisional monitoring or
troubleshooting and not leave it running 24/7. On the downside, it does NOT monitor disk
activity. The app duplicates the Resource Monitor thats already a part of the DSM software.
SYNOLOGY DHCP SERVER APP (REMOVED)
This NAS is capabable of running a DHCP
server. It has the standard settings that you would expect to find. The server DOES allow the
configuration of DHCP options which is a welcome adddition. The Synology DHCP server will support a
Proxy server via a WPAD.DAT configuration file. Unfortunately, I was unable to get SYNOLOGY DHCP to
work successfully in conjunction with my Pi-Hole. I went back to using the DHCP on the Pi-Hole.
SYNOLOGY PROXY SERVER APP (REMOVED)
This NAS is capabable of running a Proxy
server. The app itself installs with a single click and has very little configuration. However,
you will need to edit your DHCP server to make use of the Proxy.
#1 The DHCP found in most consumer routers lacks the option to specify a proxy.
#2 The DHCP found in Pihole also lacks the option to specify a proxy.
#3 Windows server does support DHCP via option #6.
#4 Synology DHCP will support the Proxy via a WPAD.DAT configuration file.
NOTE: I was NOT been successfull in getting the Synology Proxy server working. No more testing is
planned at this time as I decided not to go this route.
