New Budget Synology 4 Bay NAS

Synology today is debuting a new budget-friendly addition to its popular stable of NAS. The new DiskStation DS423 arrives with a four-bay design and more entry-level spec sheet to help make this a notable option for those setting up their first NAS. It can be loaded with up to 72TB of storage while still clocking in as the brand’s most affordable four-bay offering at $370

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That should work just fine for Infuse users like myself who don’t need heavy-duty on-device recoding (as in running a remote Plex server).

Nice find.

Quick Q: Is this tech getting more expensive (chip shortage related or whatever)?

Just checked, and I paid $359.54 for my DS418play back in August of 2018. I probably bought it at or near the lowest price available on Amazon at that time, but considering this was 5 years ago and the 418play can transcode two streams of 4K concurrently … seems odd. Or, maybe I just got a really sweet deal.

In any case, since mine doesn’t work with the expansion module, I’d still consider adding this model to increase my storage capacity; if I had the extra cash lying around at the moment. I don’t think my use case would require anything more.

[Edit]. Oh! I bought it through Amazon Warehouse Deals. That would have knocked a few bucks off (not that you’d know by looking at it). And pretty low risk purchase, since it’s bring your own drives.

If you compare the retail price to others it is the value product. I imagine we will see this get close to $300 during sales and at that price it might be worth it for some.

I got my 920+ for $440 two years ago which I think was lowest it had gone at the time.

Although I could have opted for the expansion at the time I wanted to increase my new drive capacity. I also didn’t want to add new hardware to an older system so buying a new system that would run alongside, as opposed to extend, made more sense.

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Meanwhile I’m just actively browsing the 517 expansion at £447. Seems to be at least £70 cheaper than I can get it anywhere else here in the UK.

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I’m not to that point of need (yet) but I’m still having the internal battle of whether to add the expansion or to add a new 4 bay NAS. I’m leaning toward the second NAS to avoid both boxes relying on the processor of one.

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Another advantage is power savings (for those who let their devices hibernate) as you only need one active. But for me I was at 6TB drives and with my new box I went to 16TB. That got me a lot more space a lot faster. I would have had to buy at least 3 drives on the extender.

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This is a very valid point.

Adding to that; and check me if I miss something:

The benefits of adding an expansion box are …

  • not losing at least a hard drive’s worth of storage space to data redundancy if you continue to use 1 or 2 disc failure tolerance across the expansion
  • not needing to add (gasp) two separate shares of movie and tv content to Infuse (assuming you’ve bought the second NAS to expand your library)

The benefits of choosing two separate NAS’s are…

  • only losing 1/2 your data if catastrophic failure occurs
  • one NAS can incrementally back up essential data on the other NAS and provide independent backup in case the other NAS loses that data due to user error or any other error which causes bad data to be written to it, or good data to be erased from the device (this since a single NAS will only make live backups of bad data, and alone, isn’t a valid back-up device of itself)
  • portability! If I need to travel to say … the library … with my computer and my NAS :grimacing:, I’ll only need to carry the one that has the specific data I’m needing to access, and not two separate boxes and associated power bricks and cables :grin:.

Any others?

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Another good one!

When I was looking to upgrade mine, I found it a lot easier to find new Nas boxes than the expansion units. Not sure if that was Covid supply related or not. Also, the expansion boxes don’t go on sale as often.

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