Hands on: Synology Diskstation DS223 review

The DS223 sits almost at the bottom of Synology’s huge NAS range, with only the single-slot DS124 and the more basic two-slot DS223j variant sitting below it. Accordingly, it’s not particularly well specified, with only two SATA drive bays and no NVMe slots. There’s 2GB of RAM onboard, which can’t be upgraded, while all the processing work is done by a lowly four-core Realtek CPU clocked at 1.7GHz. Perhaps just as significantly, this NAS has just a single 1GbE network port, immediately putting it at a disadvantage to 2.5GbE devices when it comes to fast file serving.

Still, the DS223 is designed and built with Synology’s usual quality. Pull off the front panel and its two drive caddies slide in and out smoothly – they’re tool-less for 3.5in disks, but you’ll need to screw 2.5in devices in place. We fitted two 4TB Synology disks, turned the NAS on, then connected to its web interface to create a RAID1 array and format it with the Btrfs file system.

While other NAS manufacturers continue to improve their software, Synology remains the master. Its DiskStation Manager (DSM) operating system strikes almost the perfect balance between functionality and ease of use. Storage Manager makes it intuitive to create and manage storage pools and volumes, while all the network, user and other settings are gathered together in Control Panel.

You can enhance and add to the DS223’s functionality through the Package Center, which at the time of our review offered 107 apps covering a range of multimedia, backup, business and communication roles. However, this NAS drive’s modest power means it could struggle to run multiple demanding apps at once.

This NAS was an underwhelming performer in our tests anyway, even compared to other devices limited to a 1GbE interface. In ATTO Disk Benchmark it was around 20% slower than other Synology NAS enclosures for a 4KB file size, and about 10% slower for 16KB files. Even though it caught up when moving 2MB files, it still managed only 111MB/sec writes and 113MB/sec reads – about the maximum possible over gigabit Ethernet. Surprisingly, however, the DS223 was quite competitive when writing files from a Windows 11 PC.

We love this NAS drive’s simplicity and comparative ease of use, but it’s significantly more expensive than QNAP’s TS-233. It’s quicker, but if speed is important we’d recommend spending more on a 2.5GbE alternative such as the QNAP TS-264.

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