Synology DiskStation DS920+ 4-bay NAS Review

The Synology DiskStation DS920+ is a compact 4-bay tower design with vertically mounted drive bays. To the right of the drive bays sit the five vertically mounted indicator LEDs; the top one is for system status with the remaining four indicators for drive activity. Under these and towards the base of the unit sit a vertically mounted USB 3.0 port and the power button.

Dominating the rear panel are the grills for the 92mm cooling fans. Under the left-hand grill sit a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports, a reset button, an eSATA port and the power in port. Under the right hand, fan sit a Kensington lock slot and a single USB3.0 port.

Now an eSATA port might be old school but in this case, it's what brings extra capacity support to the DS920+ as the NAS supports Synology's DX517 Expansion Unit. The DX517 is a 5-bay expansion unit which currently (at the time of writing) supports up to 16TB drives bringing another 80TB of storage capacity to the DS920+

The side panels of the DS920+ have Synology branding cut into them with a mesh backing to provide extra ventilation for the NAS.

The plastic drive trays are tool-free for 3.5in drives but 2.5in drives will need fixing to the bays (enough screws are provided in the box). The larger drives are held in position by plastic strips which have pins on them to go through the holes in the sides of the trays and into the mounting holes of the drive, a simple but very effective tool-free design. The drive bay doors have physical security in the shape of simple locks (Synology bundle a pair of keys with the NAS).

To give the DS920+ more performance when it comes to caching duties, Synology has built in a pair of NVMe supporting M.2 slots which sit behind hatches in the base of the NAS.

The DS920+ comes with 4GB of DDR4 installed but should you need more, the motherboard of the DS920+ supports up to 8GB memory. More memory can be added by using a single SO-DIMM slot that sits just behind the front bezel.

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