Thank you for your valuable insights. I would ignore all the very disrespectful comments. Not worth getting your BP up for it. Cheers.

If you bummed out about Google’s policy change with Google Mail/Photos, Synology have their own solution called Synology Mail Plus and Photo Station catering for this exact need. Synology Office offers an alternative to Google Office/Office 365 and Surveilance Station offers NVR capabilities to your NAS allowing a central control center for all your IP camera feeds. Surveillance Station includes 2 free licenses. Connecting more cameras and devices requires additional licenses.The biggest selling point for Synology is the software. While TerraMaster and ASUSTOR offer better hardware in this category, their software efforts don't come close to what you get with Synology. The DS723+ runs DSM 7.1, and it features an exhaustive list of software features. A thing to note here is that you can use one Synology SSD drive for storage and the other for cache if you so desired to make use of both features. While you can’t boot from these drives at the time of writing without first installing standard drives on the main drive bays, this is a significant step in the right direction for Synology after years of users requesting for SSD storage capability. Only caveat here is if you require hardware transcoding then the DS723+ might not be the best solution for you. We tested out the unit with Plex 4K Direct play The DS723+ is the 6th generation after the DS720+, DS718+, DS716+, DS713+, and DS710+. The last two digits signify their model year.

Performance figures are obtained through internal testing by Synology. Actual performance may vary depending on the testing environment, usage, and configuration. See performance charts for more information.

More ways to harness your NAS

Following what I thought was a system failure on my Synology (very old DS412+), I was in a real bind for a couple of weeks. I was torn between replacing it with a DS920+ or waiting on the pending release of the much vaunted DS1522+. The agony! Synology has switched to AMD hardware in lieu of Intel, and I'm all for it. The Ryzen R1600 that powers the DS723+ is a dual-core model with four threads, with a base frequency of 2.60GHz and 3.10GHz boost. The best part about the switch is that there's significantly more power here than the Celeron J4125-powered DS720+ and DS920+, making the DS723+ a true powerhouse. Moving on to the underside of the Synology DS723+ you’ll find 2 x M.2 NVMes SSD slots, again designed to have plenty of ventilation to keep the drives cool during operation. For the first time Synology have finally catered for the possibility to create storage pools via these SSD drives in addtion to simply cache storage with the only caveat that you need to use Synology NVMe drives ( SNV3410-400G and SNV3410-800G). If you use non Synology SSD drives, you can only use them as cache drives. It's clear that Synology is prioritizing the use of its own HAT5300 series of hard drives on its NAS models, but for most home users eyeing the DS723+, this will not be a huge issue. And having said that, you can use a 20TB IronWolf Pro with the NAS just fine; the only caveat is that should something go wrong, the brand will not provide technical assistance. should automatically be an optional expansion on every SMB NAS in 2022, especially when “budget” PCs and Macs already offer that onboard,