Brand New - DS923+ Review

The new Synology DS923+ just came out and its awesome! However there are a few key things that need to be looked at when reviewing this unit. Things like the brand new ability to finally m.2 NVMe volumes, but you have to be using Synology's NVMe drives for that.

#DS923 #synology #review

FURTHER VIDEOS:

Timecode
00:00 Intro
2:09 NAS overview
7:20 Where does this line up in the synology stack?
10:25 Performance
12:18 M2 NVMe volume
21:49 Closing thoughts and looks

[davidanderson]

Many thanks for this! I've been grinding on what to replace my DS1513+ with, which has received its last update with DSM 7.1. Your information & advice has pushed me over the edge, and I've ordered a DS923+ today. May use the 1513+ as a backup device.

[garynagle]

Thanks for the honest review.
I find it hard to believe they would ignore plex needs for a home centric nas as well as the nvme limitation. I suspect the nvme compatibility will be expanded in the future.

[BigBenAdv]

Thanks for the review. I was seriously looking to buy the DS923+ given it could potentially do 10GbE + NVME volumes (natively) till I saw this. Having to use their NVME SSD is an absolute deal-breaker for me considering I can't even slot in my own spare X520 10G NICs like in the larger (older) siblings and buying their proprietary NIC/ SSDs would push this into the DS15XX/ DS16XX cost territory.

[dfgdfg_]

That you for putting the TL;DR at the top of the description. Appreciate you valuing people's life over watch time.

[mbbrat]

Super informative review. One thing I will mention is the noise produced by those two units. I have the 923+ and the 1522+ and the noise coming from the 1522+ is noticeably louder. I can really only hear the 923+ when the drives chirp, but I can hear both louder fan noise and more chirp from the extra drive in the 1522+. I solved the Plex problem by keeping the DS920+ as the plex server. The DS923+ and 1522+ seems to be targeted more as a SMB device than a home user IMHO.

[ademkollari]

Thanks Rex. I was hoping they'd extend the m.2 as pool feature to other units (I recently acquired 920+), however, with compatibility thing, I am not holding my breath anymore. Pity, really. Didn't see much practical benefit from cache in my usage scenarios, but would love an extra pool.

[MrSunDevil]

I have a DS920+ with IronWolf 16 Gb PRO drives and it is VERY quiet. My old DS418 with IronWolf 8 Gb drives sounded like an old school coffee percolator!!

[garethcallan]

Thanks for the review. You mentioned a few weeks back that there was a work-around on this unit for those who need Plex Hardware Transcoding. You said you'd make a video on it. Have I missed it? Thank you. Gareth

[DavidM]

Thanks as always for you technically astute and honest video. I think this is a good model for product tests. Manufacturers handing over a product for a no strings attached, honest test. Hopefully they let you keep it and, presumably you don't need it so can therefore sell it to raise a few bucks to pay for your time. We all win here.

[km]

Thank you for the review. This NAS seems to be somewhat useless really. The fans in this unit have been found to be loud by some users, at least from reading comments on the internet. The processor is weak, yes it has a faster clock speed but is only dual core without graphics, uses more energy than the competition, it is loaded with 2018 and earlier ports and tech, even if you add the 10gbe (which you really have to with almost any raid setup) you only get one port. IMHO, they will eventually figure this madness out but in the meantime the competition will be benefiting from it. I know more than one Synology user that left the platform within this year... The profit they are making on their devices has to be the best in the NAS industry by a large margin, hats off to them for that! You don't need high volume if you have high margin, I bet that was the strategy.

[pjasonq]

if a DSM update is issued that allows for non-Synology branded NVMe SSDs to be used as a sharepool...you should definitely have a video on that with proof that it works and an overview of the performance. I honestly may hold off on getting a new Synology until that is released. My other option was to a 10G TrueNAS setup but I honestly like like the Synology interface.

[Budley]

Plex is about 90% of the activity my NAS tackles everyday. My living room AVR system doesn't need transcoding, but all other TVs in my home would die in buffer hell without the NAS transcoding support. Hard pass

[tawink]

I just bought a 920+ for a family member. Sounds like it’s still a good choice for now.

[brianwalsh]

Could you do a video on suitable RAM modules and Suitable M2 NVMe cache modules for Synology that are more affordable than Synology branded modules?

[terrymusenliu]

My power supply failed for my 918+ after the 4th year. Now the whole unit failed; 5th year. That’s possibly cos where I stay is very humid. Whenever I took apart the unit to clean, one can see tarnished metal frame and rusty screws. For info.

[mattido]

Thx for all your videos. I just picked up a 923+ and reused drives from an OWC enclosure. I want to swap out the drives for larger ones, preferably IronWolf drives. Will I need to reinstall DSM? Mainly interested in keeping all my settings.

[brandonj]

"Synology's petty" was my favorite part of the video

[TazzSmk]

I just learned there's a disk benchmark in DSM 7, good! :D

[pgotze]

Nice test would be combination of 1 NVMe for SSD cache + 1 NVMe for Storage pool and virtualization (i think SSD cache itself is important for overall performance). Generally i use my NAS more as application server (domain server, mail server, photos gallery, web server) combined with iSCSI LUN storage, Active Backup and Synology Drive. My idea was also to use it as virtualization engine, but i realized the performance was bad. Mainly disks were overloaded and had negative influence on directory server services. Therefore i have dedicated HPE microserver with hyper-V for cca 10 Windows virtual machines with local NVMe and i do not keep VHD storage files directly on NAS, due to performance. So question is, how better would this 923+ be with virtualization directly on this device (with max memory 32GB) and VHD storage files on NVMe storage pool. How it would behave.

[mdd]

13:49 with reads of 800 MB/sec, I'd say the NVME slots are capped at one PCI-e 3.0 lane