Synology DiskStation DS423 review

The DS423 is a four-bay Synology NAS that runs DiskStation Manager (DSM) with the Btrfs file system. It takes 3.5-inch SATA hard drives or 2.5-inch SATA SSDs, and all four bays are hot-swappable. The box ships without drives, so you buy those separately.

The hardware list is modest: a four-core Realtek processor, 2 GB of RAM and two 1GbE ports. That points towards file storage, shared folders and backups rather than heavy workloads.

Four hot-swappable bays give you room for a multi-disk volume. Because the bays accept both 3.5-inch hard drives and 2.5-inch SATA SSDs, you can fit large-capacity disks or flash, depending on what you need.

The unit also has two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports. No M.2 slot appears in the specifications, so the SSD support described here is for SATA SSDs in the drive bays. If you want a dedicated cache drive that leaves all four bays free for data, the listed hardware does not offer it.

The processor is a Realtek RTD1619B with four cores, four threads, 64-bit support and a 1.7 GHz clock. Synology lists a hardware encryption engine alongside it. The specifications don't list hardware transcoding. If on-the-fly video conversion for a media library matters to you, that gap is a reason to look at other models.

Memory is 2 GB of DDR4 non-ECC. The research gives no maximum supported RAM, so it doesn't say whether that figure can grow. With 2 GB installed and no stated ceiling, the DS423 suits file serving more than a stack of containers or several virtual machines.

There are two RJ-45 1GbE LAN ports, and Synology includes two LAN cables in the box. No faster port is listed, and the only other expansion is the pair of USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports. That is fine for backups and everyday file access. It is less comfortable if you expect to move large files between several fast clients.

DSM and the Btrfs file system are the software basis of the DS423. Synology backs the hardware with a two-year warranty. In Europe and North America you can extend that to four years with Extended Warranty Plus.

The research doesn't state how long Synology will provide DSM updates for this model, so check that before you commit to a long-term deployment.

The DS423 runs Synology's own operating system. The research doesn't say whether the unit restricts which drives you can fit, or whether it supports installing another OS. Both the 3.5-inch HDD and 2.5-inch SATA SSD options are confirmed, which gives some freedom in what you put in the bays.

Synology's figures are 32.41 W in Access mode and 4.97 W with the hard drives hibernating. The hibernation figure is the one that applies when the drives are idle, as on a backup target that sits unused for long stretches. The research gives no power figures for other models to compare against.

The DS423 is a plain four-bay NAS. Its strengths are the four hot-swappable bays, the DSM software and the extendable warranty. Its limits are 2 GB of RAM with no stated ceiling, 1GbE-only networking, and no listed M.2 slot or hardware transcoding. It fits storage and backup duties best. It is a weaker fit for container-heavy, virtualisation or media-transcoding setups, given those specifications.