Synology DiskStation DS120j single bay NAS Review – sub £100 NAS !

While it a long time for the DiskStation DS119j to appear as the successor to the DS115j, the Synology DS120j has arrived in a much shorter time frame to take over from its predecessor.

The DiskStation DS120j uses the same dual-core 64-bit Marvell Armada 3700 88F3720 (dual two Cortex-A53 ARM v8 processors) as the DS119j but has twice the amount of DDR3L memory than the previous unit, with 512MB compared to 256MB. The memory is soldered onto the motherboard so there are no memory upgrades available.

Additionally, the power consumption ratings for the DS120j are a little lower than the DS119j; 9.81W compared to 10.04W for access and 4.68W down from 5.01W for HDD hibernation.

To keep the cost of the DS120j down there are no flashy USB 3.0 or 3.1 ports, just a couple of plain old USB 2.0 connectors on the rear panel. The DS120j (at the time of writing) supports drives up to 16TB and the maximum supported single volume size is up to 108TB.

While many will consider a single bay NAS nothing more than a glorified external hard drive using a network link rather than something like USB, the DS120j does have a very useful ace up its sleeve which makes it much more than a basic external drive – Synology’s DiskStation Manager (DSM) software, which opens a wealth of possible uses for the unit. But the most important thing to remember is, this is a single drive unit so, there is no form of data protection should the disk start to fail, so backing up any data on the DS120j is a must to keep it safe.

We found the Synology DiskStation DS120J for £98.40 (inc VAT) on Span.com HERE.

Pros

• DSM OS.
• Hardware encryption.
• Well priced.

Cons

• Single disk offers no data protection.
• Only USB 2.0 ports.

KitGuru says: Supporting hard drives up to 16TB (Seagate's IronWolf, IronWolf Pro and SkyHawkAl are the only 16TB drives listed on the compatibility page at the time of writing), the DiskStation DS120j is an ideal first step along the NAS route for those who don't want to bother setting up a RAID array. But more than that, thanks to the DSM OS, it is an ideal tool to use for dedicated jobs such as data backup on an office or even home network – just remember to back up all that data at regular intervals.

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