Installation & Software
The installation of the Hard Drives is easy as the plastic trays holding the storage drives are tool-less. You simply slide them into the NAS and they click in place.
Unfortunately, as is the case with many NAS units today, these plastic hard drive trays do not have any insulation for vibration dampening. This is not good as bare plastic on metal will only increase the noise produced by the hard drives.
Software
The Synology DS223 features the latest Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM). This software is one of the main reasons to use a Synology NAS as it is one of the best around because of its complexity and security. You can look at the DSM as the operating system of the NAS because in many ways, that’s what it is.
This piece of software is the backbone of the Synology NAS, you can think of it as the operating system of the NAS.
The DSM desktop is simple in its design as it resembles a blend between a Linux and Windows operating system. It’s designed in such a way that you have all the relevant information of your system and the installed storage drives. This includes, the usage of both the storage and network, the general temperature and the storage status.
One key difference with the Synology DS223 is that it lacks certain features within the Synology DiskStation Manager. That’s because the hardware on this NAS is not capable to support these pieces of software. What you’re missing are the Active Backup suite and the Synology High Availability, among other pieces of software. Even without these, you can do all the work you want with the NAS, from file backups to scheduled tasks.
