Synology DS923+ - A preparation guide to a flexible storage platform

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Whether you run a small business or need to improve your home office, you probably thought about having a centralized storage to seamlessly manage your work. With tons of products that offer the same functionality, Synology DS923+ is something different.

The way DS923+ is different for me is for 2 reasons:

Simplicity
Speed

When I had this box, I kept waiting for the weekend to have some time to focus on its setup, and surprisingly, the whole process – including taking screenshots for this blog- took almost 10 minutes. Yes, it is that simple.

It is also speedy. Synology promotes it as “Simply Faster,” and I can confirm this after around a month of using it.

Let me take you to the preparation procedures:

1- Discovery

After preparing the hardware, I found some ways to discover the new storage that joined my network. You may find your Synology NAS via either of the following tools:

Web Assistant: Enter find.synology.com or synologynas:5000 (synologynas.local:5000 for Mac computers) in the address bar of your web browser.
Synology Assistant: Open Synology Assistant desktop utility. If Synology Assistant is not installed yet, go to Download Center > Desktop Utilities to download and install it on your computer first.

I used the simplest way (find.synology.com), and the result appeared:

The reason I had two items is that I was connected to both network interfaces. Aggregation is done later from my switch.

Next, the EULA:

Once EULA was accepted, the journey started.

2- Preparation

I found a link down this page related to device info. It has basic information about the device:

After that, and in few moments, the DiskStation Manager (DSM) was installed:

The latest DSM release is v7.2. I pictured it in my mind like a web-based control center, but there is more:

You can now choose how to deal with the updates:

And the final step is to create (or link) your Synology account:

DSM now is ready:

I had some time exploring DSM. As I said I was expecting a web-based interface, but I found a whole operating system. And like any OS, you can install packages:

One of the packages I wanted to try is “Cloud Sync”, which allows me to sync online drives (Google Drive, DropBox….etc) with DS923+.

Let’s now see some post activities. Like setting up 2-factor authentication to access DSM:

This can be done by Secure Signin authentication app from Synology as below:

The final thing is to create your storage pool:

3- Operation

From this point, I placed the storage box and started to operate. The one thing I noticed about my early use was the speed. I configured both network interfaces and aggregated from my switch. You may also see the additional 10 Gbe network interface.