A NAS such as Synology's DS216 makes file storage very easy. Photo: Supplied
I put off this review for months now, for two reasons. I wondered how I could explain what an NAS was without boring myself, and the thought of setting one up seemed too much like work.
Thankfully, activating the $369 Synology DS216 Play was incredibly easy. Just insert drives, connect via a browser, and choose the set-up you'd prefer: more storage, or greater redundancy.
So, what is a NAS? It's basically an empty enclosure you fill with hard drives, connect to your home network, then hide away somewhere. Think a low-energy, low-powered PC that's designed to share the files you don't want filling up your laptop.
The DS216 Play is small for a NAS, with just two hard drive slots, but loaded as it is with Western Digital 8TB Red drives, the gold standard, two drives can go a long way.
Synology is marketing the DS216 Play as a bucket of bits for your media collection, and the Play does a fine job in this regard.
The company has simple photo, audio and video apps for Android and iOS that scan the drives, and sort your media for easy browsing on a mobile device, with support for Airplay and Chromecast. The DS216 Play can also act as an iTunes and DLNA server, meaning you can browse and play back your files on most smart televisions, or consoles such as the PS4 and Xbox One.
Powering smooth video playback is a dedicated chip designed for 4K h.264 decoding. The DS216 never stuttered playing any of the files I threw at it. The software, DSM, continues to add features without becoming more complicated – and Video Station, the Netflix-like interface for your video files, continues to improve, with an Apple TV link added recently.
But great as Video Station is, it's no Plex, the media software by which all others are judged. It's a shame, because an NAS with the simplicity of Synology and native Plex support would be a killer combination, and an instant buy for me.
