Synology DiskStation DS214play review

The Synology DS214Play looks like a regular two-bay Synology NAS enclosure, but it uses a special Intel Atom processor with built-in video transcoding hardware to stream video to computers or devices that may not otherwise be able to play them. This feature is handy if you want to watch a video on your DS214Play but the media player on the computer you’re using doesn’t support it.

Indeed, the DS214Play lets you transcode any file containing an H.264 (AVC), MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-2 or VC-1 video stream into a form that can be handled by media software and appliances which have only limited wrapper support, such as Windows Media Player. You can find out more about the DS214Play’s transcoding capabilities at www.synology.com .

As with the Synology DS213+, installing disks in the DS214Play is a simple process. The DS214Play’s drive trays are tool-less; you just clip 3.5in hard disks into the drive trays, no screws are necessary. However, you must still screw 2.5in disks onto the drive trays.

Similarly, the DS214Play’s software setup is just as easy as with the DS213+. At the time of writing the DS214Play uses the DiskStation Manager (DSM) 4.3 operating system. DSM 4.3 gives you an easy-to-use point and click environment in which to manage your NAS and its features. If you can use Windows or Mac OS X you’ll soon become comfortable with DSM 4.3. By default, the DS214Play will set up installed hard disks so that they use Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR), which is Synology’s own system of managing data redundancy. SHR provides full redundancy for your data, so if one of your disks fails you’ll be able to recover data from the other disk.

To test the data transfer performance of the DS214Play we ran our standard throughput tests, in which we write and read sets of large and small files to and from the NAS we’re testing. We tested the DS214Play with its disks configured as an SHR volume.

Large files always transfer more quickly than small ones, but the DS214play did well in both our transfer tests when compared to similarly priced and specified NAS devices. In our large file test the DS214Play produced a write speed of 104.4MB/s and a read speed of 48.7MB/s. In our small file test, the DS214Play produced a write speed of 16MB/s and a read speed of 18.4MB/s.

THE TRANSCODER
To enable DLNA media streaming, you must install the Media Server app with DSM’s Synology Package Centre. Downloading Media Server is easy enough, but we’d have preferred to have it already preinstalled and ready to use.

Audio and video transcoding can be enabled within Media Server. Simply select the options you want to enable and you’re away. Even on Microsoft’s ageing and very limited Windows Media Player, we were able to stream FLAC and MKV files that were slickly transcoded in real time.

You can also download and run other multimedia programs in DSM, such as Audio Station, Photo Station and Video Station and you can use these apps to play media files stored on the DS214Play through your web browser. You can even make these programs accessible to non-admin users, which is helpful if you want to let your family access media stored on the DS214Play but not its control options.

The media players listed above also support features such as internet radio and the streaming of content from DLNA servers on your network. We had some trouble streaming content with older versions of Internet Explorer, but we had no difficulty streaming content with the current version of Google Chrome.

MEDIA MOGUL
The DS214play is certainly one of the more specialised NAS devices we’ve seen from Synology and it performs very well. The transcoded video and audio streams we tested were perfect, with no artefacts, glitches or loss of synchronisation. Many popular DLNA clients, including Windows Media Centre and the Xbox 360, are very limited in their format support, and some hardware streaming media receivers struggle with decoding formats such as MKV. If you have difficulty playing your media on your computer or mobile device’s media players, the DS214play could be the ideal media server for you.

In terms of throughput, the DS214play compares well to the similarly priced, Best Buy-winning Synology DS213+, and its transcoding performance makes it ideal for those who need a NAS enclosure for media storage.