The market has no shortage of high-end NAS boxes – those with beefy processors, lots of memory, and as we’re seeing more and more, 10Gbps Ethernet. While the high-end is well taken care of though, the low-end side seems to have been largely ignored, and when I say low-end, I mean lower-end than NASes that cost multiple hundreds of dollars.
What if someone wants a network storage drive at a reasonable price, but still yearns for a decent feature set, and most importantly get all of it from a trusted brand? With its DS119j, Synology has given us an attractive $100 option, so if you’ve been eyeing such a device, it’s worth a look.
As a $100 NAS, it’s probably no surprise that it’s a single-bay unit, which means it can be used for backup, but only if you have the original data stored elsewhere. It’s a grave mistake to think that simply moving data to an external drive is enough to keep you safe. A friend of mine learned the hard way about this, as important data was lost simply because it was stored only on a single device.
What a single-bay NAS is great for is the regular home user who wants to keep themselves backed up to an external device, so that in the case of disaster, the data will still be available. It’s also ideal as a dedicated device to share data around the network, whether it be picture files for Adobe Lightroom or video content for PLEX.
The DS119j doesn’t hold anything back on the performance front, which is a lot easier when RAID isn’t involved. Synology says you can expect 112MB/s reads, and 108MB/s writes. Under the hood, a dual-core Marvell A3720 (800MHz) CPU will help with the encryption tasks – something that will drop the write performance down to 67MB/s, which seems great for a NAS of this price point.
The NAS consumes up to 10W when in use, and at idle, the NAS and hard drive combined will sit at 5W. The NAS offers wake-on-LAN support, so you won’t have to hear the drive when you’re not actually accessing your storage (at the expense of having to wait for the drive to wake up as well).
As for expandability, this NAS has two USB ports at the back, allowing you to easily back up your data to another device, or access its storage on the network. With Synology’s DSM software, you can schedule backup routines to save to external storage. The fact that there are two USB ports on a $100 NAS surprises me a bit, since some higher-end NASes of just a few years ago were regularly sold with just one.
On paper, I’m impressed. For $100, the DS119j seems like an amazing device to wrap around a new hard drive. The last external enclosure I purchased was $60…