Synology DiskStation BeyondCloud Mirror NAS Review

In this day and age people are looking for storage solutions that their entire household can utilize. A personal cloud-storage solution that is easy to set-up and easy to access. Synology has an answer to that. Enter their BeyondCloud Network Attached Storage (NAS) product line. A plug and play, external storage solution that is easy to set-up, configure and runs within the Macintosh environment or really any computer environment right out of the box.

Features and Specifications

Synology offers three different models of their BeyondCloud product:

• BeyondCloud 2TB (BC115j 1200)
• BeyondCloud 3TB (BC115j 1300)
• BeyondCloud Mirror 3TB (BC214se 2300)

Synology BeyondCloud has features such as minimal setup, pre-installation of a Seagate NAS harddrive, pre-installed and configured operating system, USB backup, and in the case of the BeyondCloud Mirror, RAID protection for your data from single harddrive failure. You don’t need to worry about selecting the right NAS enclosure, the types of harddrives or any of those lower-level details that can make setting up a NAS a bit more difficult. Synology does it all for you and in an attractive white enclosure.

Synology has provided us with their BeyondCloud Mirror configuration which has 2x 3TB in a RAID1 (Mirrored) configuration. This is great in-case one of the drives ever fails since your data will be safe on the other one.

For those who are more into the technical specifications that are under this particular BeyondCloud’s hood, Synology has made use of the Marvell Armada 370CPU (ARM-7, 800MHz, Single Core with FPU) and 256MB of RAM. It might not seem like much to hardcore NAS builders, but it definitely gets the job done for those who don’t have time to source various NAS options out there.

What’s In The Box?

Synology has tried to make things as simple as possible with their BeyondCloud product. No need to source hard-drives or install any hardware, the BeyondCloud system comes installed and pre-configured out of the box. So inside the box, you get the NAS hardware itself (drive capacity varies on model), the AC power cable and an Ethernet cable. Everything you need to get yourself up and running within minutes.

I would recommend utilizing a Gigabit Ethernet (10/100/1000) network to get the most out of your NAS experience.

First Impressions

I have had an interest in storage solutions for some time now. Being an avid photographer with thousands upon thousands of digital images I’m always on the look out for new storage solutions. The easier they are to set-up, the quicker I can get back to capturing images.

Previously I’ve been making use of a WD MyCloud (2TB). The WD MyCloud allowed me to access some of my files remotely when needed. Though I’ve had some issues with it, some major issues with it actually. For starters, the WD server that handles the port forwarding access has been a big grievance of mine and has cost me in the long run as it keeps having issues finding the MyCloud on my home network. I can access my internal IP Security Cameras without issues, but WD tends to say my MyCloud is not online or my network is unreachable which is untrue if I can still access my internal IP cameras.

The lack of mobile apps or feature set of those apps across different devices has been an issue too with the WD MyCloud. One thing I’ve wanted to do is have an easy way to back up my wife’s iPhone photos.  Something that would allow her to backup photos with out her really having to do anything. The Android version of the WD Photos app would auto-sync in the background whereas the iOS version would not. Tragic, I know but it is a deal breaker. It seems almost every month or so I have to plug her phone into a computer, off load her photos and videos and then erase them. I’ve read that I won’t have to do this with any of Synology’s NAS products.

For the operating system, Synology offers and their DiskStation Manager (DSM) OS. I was excited when I got my hands on the BeyondCloud.  How does the BeyondCloud stack up against similar products already on the market? Well, let us take a look!

The NAS Enclosure

The outside of the BeyondCloud enclosure is a fairly simple and clean in design. Air vents along the sides (spelling out “Synology” obviously) help allow the rear fan to draw in air to keep the internal components from overheating.  The front bezel consists of a power button and 4 LEDs for status, which are fairly simple and easy to see from across the room.

The rear of the Synology BeyondCloud enclosure is neat and tidy with 2x USB2.0 Ports, 1x Gigabit Ethernet Port,  the AC adapter port and of course the rear fan. There are 2 screws (1 top and 1 bottom) that allow you to remove the cover and access the two 3.5 inch hard drives. A laptop-style cable lock port is also located on the back plate of the enclosure. At first it was a disappointment to not see USB3.0 ports like the WD MyCloud offers, but not a deal breaker for me. Other versions of Synology’s NAS Products can offer USB3.0 ports for added backup capacity.

Hopefully you will never have to replace either of the internal drives, but accessing them is really easy. Unscrew the 2 screws that I briefly mentioned on the back of the enclosure, then slide one side off from the other and voilà! The enclosed Seagate NAS 3.5 inch drives are easily replaceable by removing the side screws and sliding either drive from their respective SATA connection. You could probably replace the rear fan if you wanted too as it uses a simple 3-pin connector to the logic board.

Setup and Configuration

When you first set up the device, Synology requires you connect to their server (image above). This will link your BeyondCloud (primarily your device’s MAC address) with their servers so that you can remotely access it when you’re not on your own private network. According to their website, all they do is pass the traffic back and forth, they don’t look at the data. If you are paranoid with a service such as this, you can always make use of a VPN tunnel. Synology essentially does the port forwarding for you so those who are not familiar with router technology, can easily access their devices without changing their home router configuration. You can also make use of their QuickConnect.to feature by giving your BeyondCloud a unique name and making use of it amongst all your remote locations/devices.

Once you’ve linked your device to their server (for remote access capabilities) you will then be presented with the initial login screen and the heart of the Synology experience; DiskStation Manager or DSM for short. Don’t worry, if you’re setting up the device, chances are you are connecting to it via it’s local LAN IP address. Whenever you are at home, you can use its IP address to access the device without going through their forwarding services. I would also recommend giving the device its own statically assigned IP so you can always access it locally, as you will hopefully remember the address it is at, unlike DHCP, where it may not have the same IP address it previously had.

Setting  up the BeyondCloud will vary from person to person, need to need. For my purposes, I would enable things like Photo Sharing, Cloud Syncing, perhaps the Media Server and even the IP Security Camera app. There are so many different options you can configure your BeyondCloud to do. They are also really easy to access and set up as well!

In my particular case I want to be able to make use of multiple services. As you can see from the above screenshot I have installed PhotoStation (used to store photos as well as sync photos/videos from mobile devices), CloudStation (your very own personal Dropbox without that monthly fee), VideoStation (Stream TV Shows or Movies to your various network connected devices) and Media Server (Audio, Video server).

Other services you can have running on your BeyondCloud are things like, personal a web server (running Apache/PHP/MySQL ala LAMP), an iTunes Server, Git Server, a CMS, a Directory Server, a DNS Server, make use of a telphony service such as Asterisk, Mail server and more. There are dozens upon dozens of applications/services you can make use of. Though, the more services you run, the more system resources will be required (CPU speed, RAM, storage etc). All at the click of a button.

Performance and Usage

So how does the BeyondCloud system handle day to day tasks you might throw at it? In the time that I have made use of the BeyondCloud Mirror, it has not disappointed me. First, it has never gone down, and second, it’s been running non-stop for nearly 60 days straight now without a reboot, sluggishness, or any subjective feelings of lag. But let’s run some benchmarks just to be sure that what we’re feeling lines up with the data.

Data Transfer Performance

I mapped one of the folders that I set up on the Synology BeyondCloud to my Macbook Air so that I could test the transfer speeds between the two. Now, since my Macbook Air does not natively have an Ethernet port built in, I am connected via a Thunderbolt to external Gigabit Ethernet adapter, which should be plenty of bandwidth for this sort of test. I kicked off a test with BlackMagic Disk Speed Test to test what sort of read and writes speeds we could obtain.

If you’re not familiar with BlackMagic Disk Speed Test, it’s a utility used to measure the capability of a device to read and write real-time video streams to a storage device. And because real-time video is latency sensitive, it’s a very good test of the Synology BeyondCloud’s potential performance.

Gigabit Ethernet has a theoretical speed of 1000 Megabits per second, which is about 125 Megabytes per second. In the above screenshot, you can see that it is keeping around 44.7 Megabytes per second on the write and 45.5 Megabytes per second on the read. This works out to be about 357.6 Megabits per second write and 363.2 Megabites per second read. It would take approximately 90 seconds to transfer about 4 GB worth of data. Not bad right?

Also worth noting that if you wanted to, you could use the device to encode basic NTSC or PAL programming to the device over the network, but anything HD 720p or greater would be problematic.

While running BlackMagic Disk Speed Test, I took a look at what was going under the hood of the BeyondCloud at the same time. According to the Resource Monitor widget, the CPU was quite busy handling the constant network load I was sending it. The LAN doesn’t reflect this though, but when I stopped the speed test, the CPU resumed back to about 10% usage and the LAN traffic went to essentially nill.

If you’re going to use your BeyondCloud to do multiple things over a network at the same time, you may run into some bottlenecks with the CPU usage. In my own usage I would probably not run into this situation as I would be doing one big task at a time, never multiple large resource type tasks, like video streaming, backing up large files at the same time. If you need better performance for higher loads you need to spend more.

A side note about my setup and configurations;  I have setup two user accounts, both with their own home directory and specific access permissions to the file system. This is another place that the BeyondCloud and Disk Station Manager shine over other products I’ve used.

Next, let’s look at some of the apps I have installed and have running on the BeyondCloud Mirror and then give you my take on the experience.

Synology Apps

When you setup your Synology BeyondCloud, you’ll likely run into their App Store. There are a number of apps available to try out but here are the three that worked best for me, using this device as a repository for uploading my smartphone photos and sharing and managing video content over the web. Things that I felt that the WD MyCloud offering didn’t do quite as well as it could in.

CloudSync

CloudSync is the “DropBox” service. You can sync between desktops, laptops, tablets, phones and much more. All between Windows, MacOS and Linux environments. Both user accounts have access to their own CloudSync location as well as a central location to share files between each other. All in all, a very useful app and much better put together than my previous experience with the WD MyCloud.

PhotoStation (DS Photo)

PhotoStation offers a personal photo sharing experience (think of it as your own personal Flickr web service) but I personally would use it for ensuring  photos can be synced between home network and remote locations. It also allows to sync your photos and videos taken with your smartphone, via DS Photo. This, in my opinion, works better than the WD MyCloud offering. With Synology, both smart phones (Android and iOS based) were able to keep their photos and videos synced without human intervention. A much better experience overall.

VideoStation (DS Video)

Think of VideoStation (DS Video on mobile) as a service similar to Netflix or Plex  for your home network. You can stream TV Shows, Movies and other videos to various devices such as Smart TVs, Steaming Devices and even gaming consoles. In our case, I make use Video Station with our Sony PS3 and Roku 3. A central library for digital entertainment with a no-hassle setup. Actually, the DS214se, which is what the BeyondCloud 2300 (BC214se) is based on, does not have the horsepower behind it to automatically transcode videos on the fly, so you will need to ensure the video formats you use are the correct formats your other devices are able to play. Luckily for me, as long as the files are in MP4 (mp4 wrappers) with Mp3 (non AAC) audio, the PS3 and Roku 3 can play them with no issues. It even pulls the titles, synopsis and more over the Internet! Have I mentioned it keeps track of where you are in the video too?

You can resume watching a video from the place you left off from. It will even play from where you left off at on another device. That’s pretty cool

If you are streaming over WiFi, try and utilize 5GHz channels if you’re wireless router can handle dual-bands. This will give you more bandwidth for streaming the video/audio wirelessly and also help keep interference to a minimum. There are far more devices in a household running in the 2.4GHz bands (typical WiFi, Microwaves, Cordless Phones etc) than 5GHz bands.

One last app worth a mention is MediaServer which allows things such as video (via VideoStation) as well as photos and audio (music) to be streamed to various devices. There are many other applications/services you can install and play with through their app library.

Final Thoughts

The Synology BeyondCloud worked wonderfully over the course of my testing. I have never had any connectivity issues like I experienced with my WD MyCloud. I’ve expanded our network of entertainment within the house and my wife’s and my mobile photos/videos are being synced without us having to do anything extra. It just works!

As mentioned setup was easy and straight-forward and it was nice not having to source out hard drives or configure the RAID0 setup, among other things. Being able to power on the device, register it and have it up and ready is great. And if you’re looking for desktop applications, the CloudSync app is available on Linux (Ubuntu 14.04, Windows 7 and MacOS X) and it’s nice you don’t have to hunt around on Synology’s website trying to find the latest version, they are easily accessible right from your own device.

OS updates for the DiskStation Manager (DSM) will notify you via their menu bar that there are updates pending, and DSM (core) updates are free for up to 5 years, which is great!

If you are looking for an easy to setup and use NAS with personal “Cloud” capabilities for your home or small office, I would recommend checking out the Synology BeyondCloud. Along with the great mobile apps, this is definitely a great product for those of use that want to set it and forget it.

The Synology DiskStation BeyondCloud Mirror retails for approximately $399 US and comes with a 2 year warranty.