Synology DS212J NAS Enclosure

I read many good reviews on this Synology DS212J NAS enclosure over the internet and got interested. Before buying this, I’ve been using the Terastation TS-XE4.0TL/R5 for almost 2 years and it has been great. It has 4x 1TB drives. I have them set up in a RAID5 so I get a little over 2TB storage. It’s getting full and I wanted a cheaper and quick solution to expand it. Hard drives at this time are very expensive. I have 2x 2TB Hitachi Deskstar 5k3000 hard drives lying around that I got for $60 each a few months ago. I’m glad I bought those when they were cheap.

This NAS enclosure comes with 2 bays, perfect for my spare 2TB drives. I set them up to be in a RAID1. It’s easy to setup and configure, although the interface takes a few to get used to but that’s how it is with anything new. It has 2 USB 2.0 ports where I can plug an additional external hard drive or a printer and it can be shared as well. The NIC port is gigabit and seems to be faster than my Terastation with dual NIC gigabit ports (even with teaming enabled).

The current version of DSM is 4.0 and has many fixes that people complained about with the previous versions. The interface is intuitive and can be accessed using any browser. With this device, I can send my Time Machine backups over the wireless network. The power consumption is also low. I’m getting around 22 kwH watts. If you’re looking for a NAS enclosure and need only 2 bays, I highly recommend checking this one out.