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Everything is made simpler with a series of wizards that set up new shares and users, assigning them appropriate read and write access – and, if you wish, disk space quotas. Even those who aren’t familiar with NAS drives will feel relatively at home with the windowed interface. The NAS interface makes it easy to tweak this setup. It’s also possible to map any of the shares as network drives in Explorer. You can access these with the NAS’s IP address, but it’s much easier in Windows to just press Windows-R to bring up the Run box and type the NAS’s name as a network share, such as \ds216. It also sets up shares for music, photos, videos and a generic “home” folder.

Synology DS216 – Operating System and Appsīy default, the NAS sets its two disks as a Synology Hybrid Raid (SHR) array, which can tolerate the failure of one disk without data loss. There’s was no fiddling with the router required to get this to work, either – even with UPnP disabled. It also lets you access the NAS interface over the internet, away from your home network.

This is particularly useful for accessing the NAS from mobile apps, since you don’t need to remember its IP address on your network.
SYNOLOGY DRIVE TRAY KEY INSTALL
This will search for and connect to your NAS, and you then just click the big disk icon to download and install the latest version of the DSM operating system directly to your NAS.Ī wizard will then take you through setting up an administrator account, and asks you to choose a QuickConnect ID. Once the disks are fitted, simply plug the NAS into your router with the supplied 1.5m network cable, power it on and go to from a web browser. Screws will only be needed if you’re fitting 2.5in hard disks or SSDs into the trays. Everything is labelled, too, such as “up” printed on the drive tray so you get it the right way around. For a start, there’s no screwdriver needed here: just pop off the front panel, slide out a drive tray and clip your 3.5in hard disks into place. The provided quick-start guide is pretty minimal, but the NAS does make life easy for you during setup. It does feel like it won’t pick up scratches too easily, and the shiny faceplate adds a touch of style. It’s a plain-looking NAS, with a no-nonsense matte black case this is in contrast to the shiny white plastic of the home-orientated models. The DS216 runs the latest DSM 6 operating system, which provides a friendly, mouse-driven interface that you can access through a web browser.
SYNOLOGY DRIVE TRAY KEY TV
You’ll also find one USB on the front and two USB 3 ports on the rear, to plug in hard disks, TV tuners or wireless dongles, along with Gigabit Ethernet. Since it’s an office model, it has a quick processor to help with fast file transfers: a dual-core 1.3GHz model, compared to the 1GHz chip in the DS216j. This is a two-bay NAS, so your data is protected if one disk fails, and it supports 3.5in hard disks as well as 2.5in hard disks and SSDs. Related: Buffalo LinkStation 520D review Synology DS216 – Specifications and Design It’s more expensive than Synology’s home-orientated DS216j, but it’s quicker and has useful extra features such as hot-swappable hard disks and one-touch copy from flash drives to the NAS. In Synology’s huge range of network-attached storage (NAS) devices, the two-disk DS216 is billed as a budget option for a small office.
