Why you may belief TechRadar
We spend hours testing each services or products we evaluate, so that you will be positive you’re shopping for the very best. Discover out extra about how we check.
Synology DiskStation DS925+: Two-minute evaluate
Specs
CPU: AMD Ryzen V1500B
Graphics: None
RAM: 4GB DDR4 ECC SODIMM (Max 32GB)
Storage: 80TB (20TB HDD x4), 1.6TB (800GB M.2 x2)
Ports: 2x Sort-A (5Gbps), 1x Sort-C (5Gbps), 2x 2.5GbE Ethernet ports
Dimension: 166 x 199 x 223mm (6.5 x 7.8 x 8.8 inches)
OS put in: DSM 7
Equipment: 2x LAN cables, 2x drive-bay lock keys, AC energy wire
Synology has been producing community connected storage (NAS) know-how for over 20 years, and its gadgets have maintained a constant feel and look. In that point, the corporate has developed a extremely polished working system that’s full of all kinds of bespoke and third-party apps that do all the pieces from merely backing up information on a house or workplace community, via managing a family’s multimedia necessities, to working a enterprise’s whole IT stack. The latter consists of enterprise-grade backup, all types of server performance, e-mail and web-hosting, digital machine administration, surveillance digital camera administration and far, way more.
In more moderen years, Synology has hunkered down in its personal section of the NAS market – eschewing broad compatibility with third-party {hardware} suppliers and a Wild-West utility neighborhood in favor of a extra closed {and professional} working setting, the place it’s a must to purchase costly Synology drives to populate the packing containers. Whereas these compatibility adjustments have pushed some customers away, what stays continues to be an extremely sturdy, well-supported and well-documented ecosystem that has an enormous neighborhood following.
The brand new DiskStation DS925+ is one thing of a well-liked, sweet-spot measurement that may go well with new customers and community admins alike. At a look, it seems precisely like a number of generations of its predecessors and it operates very very like them. Its most vital options embrace 4 bays that assist each 3.5-inch and a couple of.5-inch drives and two M.2 NVMe SSD slots. Its tool-less design and easy setup wizards make it fast and simple to construct, and you’ll be up and working in lower than quarter-hour. It runs quietly and will be positioned on prime of a desk or hidden away (in a ventilated location) discreetly. To informal customers (with deep pockets) who need entry to Synology’s apps and wish solely primary NAS performance, we might cease there. Fanatics will wish to know extra.
The record of suitable drives is now smaller than ever. Whereas Synology has kicked certification of third-party drives over to distributors like Seagate and WD, it doesn’t seem to have resulted in additional alternative… but. On the time of writing, you’re nonetheless restricted to Synology’s newest Plus Collection client drives (which go as much as 16TB), its Enterprise drives (as much as 20TB), its 2.5-inch SSDs (as much as 7TB) and its Enterprise-level M.2 NVMe drives (as much as 800GB). All of them are significantly costlier than incompatible third-party counterparts.
The DS925+ comes with one in all its two SO-DIMM slots populated with 4GB of DDR4 ECC RAM. You possibly can improve to 2 sticks of Synology’s personal 16GB ECC RAM (for 32GB whole) if required, however not if you happen to’re trying to economize. The introduction of error-correcting (ECC) RAM at this stage is a boon, nonetheless.
It must be famous that if you happen to’re seeking to the DS925+ as an improve for an older Synology NAS, it will enable third-party drives if it acknowledges an present DSM set up. Nonetheless, you’ll get fixed drive compatibility warnings in return.
Constructive new {hardware} options embrace a beefed-up, quad-core, eight-thread AMD Ryzen V1500B processor (notice that there’s no built-in GPU) and its two community ports are lastly 2.5GbE. There are each entrance and rear-mounted USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports plus a brand new, barely controversial, USB-C port for connecting an exterior, 5-bay extension unit (changing outdated eSATA-connected choices). What’s most bothersome, although, is the shortage of a PCIe community growth for upgrading to 10GbE connectivity, which limits the doable community switch speeds.
In the end, the preliminary outlay for a DS925+ will be monumental in comparison with rivals available on the market. Nonetheless, if you happen to’re going to utilize the huge libraries of free software program functions and licenses, it’ll signify nice worth.
Synology DiskStation DS925+: Value & availability
Synology’s DiskStation DS925+ solely just lately launched and has restricted availability in just a few markets. It’s listed at $830 / £551 / AU$1,099.
General, it is effectively priced in comparison with its closest opponents such because the TerraMaster F4-424 Max, in addition to different Synology NAS gadgets.
Synology DiskStation DS925+: Design & construct
Whereas the DiskStation DS925+ seems like its predecessors, I felt that it was considerably extra sturdy and fewer rattly than a few of its forebears. No matter that, it’s nonetheless a small and discreet black field that won’t draw consideration to itself, wherever it’s positioned.
The tool-less design makes including exhausting drives easy. For 3.5-inch drives, you simply elevate up the drive bay door, pull out the drive tray, unclip the tray’s facet bars, put the drive within the tray, clip the bars again on (they use rubber grommets to scale back sound and vibrations) and slide it again in. If you would like, you may ‘lock’ every drive bay with a key to discourage opportunistic thieves.
Including RAM includes eradicating the drive bays and including SO-DIMMs to the inner slots on the facet. Including the M.2 NVMe drives includes merely unclipping the covers on the bottom and sliding them in. Including six drives takes lower than 5 minutes.
A totally populated DS925+ runs very quietly – Synology says simply 20dB – and I can attest that there’s solely a really quiet whooshing noise made by the twin 92mm followers, and the drives solely make occasional, very low clicking and popping sounds.
Putting in the working system can be easy. A QR code within the field supplies entry to a web based setup doc with a hyperlink that routinely finds your NAS on the community earlier than providing to put in all the pieces for you. After a fast firmware replace, it reboots and also you’ll be trying on the DSM desktop, in an online browser, only a few minutes later. The NAS will then immediate you to signal right into a Synology account, arrange SSO and MFA log-ins and set up some primary apps.
Newcomers may wrestle at first with the terminology surrounding the preliminary setup of the drives, however (on the primary stage) the NAS walks you thru the method. It includes organizing the drives right into a storage pool, then making a quantity after which including folders. You’ll even be prompted to record which customers can have View, Learn or Write entry. At this level you’ve acquired useful network-attached storage that may be accessed throughout your community.
Picture 1 of 4
The working system is well-polished and putting in bespoke and third-party apps is easy because of the Bundle Heart utility which operates like a free App Retailer. It’s additionally easy to allow distant entry utilizing Synology’s QuickConnect ID short-web-link system.
An fascinating change with the DiskStation DS925+ is the removing of the (6Gbps) eSATA port for connecting Synology’s optionally available, legacy, exterior drive bays and its substitute with a single (5Gbps) USB-C port which connects to a Synology DX525 5-bay growth unit. I did not have an growth bay readily available to check this, however the efficiency distinction must be minimal.
Whereas there are solely two 2.5GbE community ports, you may mix them in numerous methods, with the simplest (load balancing) changing into operational in only a few clicks. It’s extra suited to a number of connections somewhat than bettering prime velocity, although.
Lastly, it’s value noting that compatibility with third-party drives is now strictly restricted. On the time of writing, the DS925+ was solely suitable with its personal (as much as 16TB) prosumer Plus Collection exhausting drives, its (as much as 20TB) Enterprise Collection exhausting drives and (as much as 7TB) SSDs, plus its 400GB and 800GB M.2 NVMe drives. All of those price significantly greater than third-party equivalents. Synology is blunt about why it has restricted compatibility a lot – it acquired sick of coping with assist requests that always boiled right down to conflicts and crashes attributable to drive failures and subsequent arguments with third-party drive distributors. Whereas it’s annoying, I can sympathize with that.
- Design & construct rating: 5 / 5
Synology DiskStation DS925+: Options
It’s difficult to know simply the place to start out with the quite a few options which might be out there with the DiskStation DS925+. It performs nearly each enterprise and client job you may think about. For a lot of smart-home customers, the assorted multi-device backup utilities, multimedia group instruments and media-server performance (together with Plex, Emby and Jellyfin) shall be used greater than the rest.
For prosumer and enterprise customers, it may be your full-stack IT service supplier. There are apps that may remodel your NAS into an enterprise-grade backup resolution with off-site (third-party and Synology C2) cloud capabilities; e-mail server; net server; Synology Workplace utility supplier; surveillance digital camera supervisor; anti-malware safety; digital machine supervisor and a VPN server.
In all of those functions, a number of person licenses are included, which boosts the worth proposition via the roof.
There’s a large number of third-party functions and high-quality documentation (overlaying nearly all the pieces) that has been created by a big and mature Synology-enthusiast neighborhood.
Community admins can even just like the quite a few drive-formatting choices, granular person permission administration and SSO and MFA safety choices.
Storage capability will be elevated through a USB-C linked, five-drive-bay growth unit.
The 2 USB-A ports (entrance and rear) have had many capabilities eliminated to allow them to not be used to attach potential safety nightmares like printers, media gadgets, or community adapters, however they will nonetheless be used for connecting exterior USB storage gadgets.
The dual 92mm followers are quiet and, at the side of well-designed vents, do a superb job of cooling the NAS. That mentioned, remember to place it in a location the place airflow isn’t impeded and the vents gained’t get clogged with mud.
Synology DiskStation DS925+: Efficiency
To check the DiskStation DS925+, I put in 4 Synology 3.5-inch, 4TB exhausting drives and formatted them with Synology’s personal RAID-5-like Btrfs file system which affords striped efficiency boosts, disk-failure redundancy safety and quite a few enhancements that work with Synology’s backup utilities. It left me with a ten.4TB quantity and meant I might lose/take away anyone drive with out struggling knowledge loss.
I additionally put in two 400GB M.2 NVMe SSDs as a single Btrfs storage quantity (they can be used for caching) which gave me a usable capability of 362.4GB.
I transferred information from one quantity to the opposite and hit sustained switch speeds that peaked at 435MB/s, however most individuals shall be shifting knowledge externally.
I subsequently carried out a number of assessments to seek out its real-world limits, see what doing with out a 10GbE port possibility meant and uncover what advantages the 2 (configurable) 2.5GbE LAN ports provided. I did this by connecting the NAS to a high-end, TP-Hyperlink Deco BE85 Wi-Fi 7 Router (with 10GbE LAN ports) through Ethernet and downloading massive video information utilizing numerous wired and wi-fi configurations.
I in contrast the DS925+’s efficiency to that of an older, two-bay Synology DiskStation DS723+ that has a 10GbE wired connection, a twin 3.5-inch exhausting drive quantity and a newly fitted, single, 800GB Synology M.2 NVMe SSD-based quantity.
I examined utilizing a high-end Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D gaming laptop computer with a 2.5GbE LAN connection and Wi-Fi 6E, in addition to a brand new Core Extremely (Collection 2) Asus Vivobook 14 Flip with Wi-Fi 7.
I began with the DS723+ which I’ve been utilizing for testing Wi-Fi routers. With the Scar’s 2.5GbE Ethernet port linked by wire to the Deco router, I noticed sustained switch speeds that hit 245MB/s for each the DS723+’s HDD quantity and its NVMe quantity. Over a 5GHz Wi-Fi 6E wi-fi connection, this dropped to 194MB/s for each volumes. Over a 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E wi-fi connection, it achieved 197MB/s utilizing the HDD quantity and 215MB/s for the NVMe quantity.
Switching to the Wi-Fi 7 VivoBook, on the 5GHz wi-fi connection, it managed 180MB/s for each the HDD and NVMe volumes. Nonetheless, when utilizing the 6GHz Wi-Fi 7 community, it achieved 244MB/s for the HDD quantity and an astonishing 347MB/s for the NVMe quantity. That proper there’s the facility of getting a 10GbE-equipped NAS (with an NVMe drive) linked to a Wi-Fi 7 community. Cables, schmables! That’s greater than sufficient for modifying a number of streams of UHD video directly.
So, how did the newer DS925+ examine? When it was linked to the Deco through a single 2.5GbE port, the two.5GbE LAN linked Asus laptop computer reached 280MB/s for the HDD quantity and 282MB/s for the NVMe quantity – a superb 35MB/s faster than the two-bay DS723+. Over 5GHz Wi-Fi these scores each dropped to 190MB/s which has similarities to the DS723+, illustrating a possible 5GHz Wi-Fi bottleneck. Apparently, efficiency was constantly slower throughout the Scar’s 6GHz assessments, the place it hit 163MB/s (HDD quantity) and 172MB/s (NVMe quantity), however that is once more possible attributable to the community, not the NAS.
When the VivoBook linked through the 5GHz community, it managed 186MB/s transfers for each volumes. Over Wi-Fi 7 this jumped as much as 272MB/s for the HDD quantity and 278MB/s for the SSD quantity. So, so far, the file switch efficiency advantages of getting NVMe storage on the DS925+ aren’t important when passing via the bottleneck of its 2.5GbE LAN port.
Consequently, I bonded the 2 2.5GbE connections collectively to type a ‘single’ 5GbE connection in an effort to spice up efficiency. This takes only a few clicks in DSM’s management panel. I opted for the fundamental Adaptive Load Balancing possibility, however there are a number of different configurations for numerous forms of community topology.
So, with the DS925+’s two Ethernet cables forming a single 5Gbps connection to the Deco router, I ran the assessments once more. The two.5GbE-connected ROG Strix Scar noticed switch speeds (to each the HDD and SSD volumes) solely attain 168MB/s, which is round 120MB/s slower than when the NAS was linked through a single 2.5GbE wired connection. Over 5GHz Wi-Fi this boosted (barely) to 188MB/s for each volumes and over the 6GHz community, it dropped again to 170MB/s for each volumes. It’s honest to say that combining the DS925+’s two 2.5GbE ports is healthier suited to dealing with a number of community streams somewhat than boosting efficiency of a single connection.
Nonetheless, I repeated the check with the VivoBook. Over 5GHz Wi-Fi, each volumes noticed switch speeds of 176MB/s. Over 6GHz Wi-Fi 7, it hit 283MB/s.
So, what have we realized in regards to the DS925+’s file transfer-speed potential? Utilizing a 2.5GbE wired connection to and from the router, it tops out at 280MB/s. Connecting the laptop computer through 5GHz Wi-Fi sometimes sees switch speeds of between 160MB/s and 185MB/s, however over 6GHz Wi-Fi 7, as much as 283MB/s is feasible. Which means that, in the best circumstances, Wi-Fi 7 can match 2.5GbE connection speeds.
We additionally realized that combining the DS925+’s two 2.5GbE connections (not less than, in my explicit setup) reduces the highest switch velocity. Most significantly, which means shedding the choice for a 10GbE improve stops us hitting insane 347MB/s speeds over Wi-Fi 7, and 283MB/s is the lowered ceiling. As such, it’s straight-up not value utilizing the M.2 drives for file switch efficiency boosting as the two.5GbE connection(s) act as a bottleneck.
That every one mentioned, the M.2 drives can nonetheless enhance efficiency via caching performance and Synology notes it can provide a 15x enchancment to random learn and write IOPS. This shall be a a lot larger deal in conditions with a number of connections occurring concurrently.
Whereas some high-end customers will miss the choice to improve to a 10GbE efficiency ceiling, I discovered it’s nonetheless greater than sufficient to facilitate very excessive bitrate, 60FPS, UHD+ video playback (and a number of UHD video stream modifying) along with having a number of simultaneous connections performing quite a few lesser duties.
- Efficiency rating: 4.5 / 5
Must you purchase the Synology DiskStation DS925+?
It has change into regular to gripe in regards to the design selections and limitations that Synology imposes on every technology of its prosumer NAS packing containers. Nonetheless, if we eradicate the potential purchasers it gained’t go well with – i.e. those that want a 10GbE connection and those that can’t afford all of the costly Synology exhausting drives required to populate it – it’s completely value shopping for.
Its extremely advanced chassis is deceptively effectively constructed by way of tool-less entry, rigidity, cooling and airflow. Its working setting stays safe, sturdy and intuitive and is full of options. Its software program library will fulfill informal and demanding customers plus community admins alike and nearly all of it’s free.
Whereas it’s misplaced the hodgepodge, stick-your-old-hard-drives-in-a-box-and-hack-a-NAS-together old-school vibe, it’s now a dependable (and scalable) skilled spine for any enterprise or smart-home.
As an all-around package deal, it’s the very best available on the market for its target market. Sure, it may be costly to populate with drives, however the subsequent whole price of possession borne via reliability, software program licensing and built-in safety features assist offset the burden of the preliminary outlay. Which means that the DS925+ is, as soon as once more, a extremely fascinating winner from Synology.
|
Attribute |
Notes |
Rating |
|
Worth |
A closed market makes shopping for drives costly. However, the free software program library could make it a discount, regardless. |
4.5 |
|
Design |
It’s extremely easy to place collectively because of its tool-less design. The software program is voluminous, polished, mature, safe and dependable. It additionally runs cool and quiet. |
5 |
|
Options |
Whether or not you’re an undemanding client or a community admin, the DS925+ can do all of it. |
5 |
|
Efficiency |
The shortage of an improve choice to a 10GbE port limits peak efficiency, nevertheless it’s nonetheless not gradual. |
4.5 |
|
Complete |
Synology’s newest 4-bay NAS is as enticing as its predecessors, which is excessive reward certainly. |
5 |
Purchase it if…
Do not buy it if…
For extra network-attached storage choices, we have additionally examined the greatest NAS & media server distro.
