Synology DS419slim 2.5″ 4-Bay Mini NAS Review

Synology DS419slim 2.5″ 4-Bay NAS Review

Today’s review is a little something special in the NAS area. Not only do we get an unusual size, we’re also using a new type of drives to test it. I have Synology‘s brand new DS419slim in the office which is a NAS designed for 2.5″ drives only.

Synology DS419slim

The new DS419slim is the direct followup to the DS416slim from a couple of years ago. It follows the same principles, just with modern and more powerful hardware. At the base, it is an unusual NAS, at least when we think about the NAS devices we see most of the times. The DS419slim is designed for 2.5″ drives only which allow it to have a very small footprint. With its measurements of just 10.5cm width and 14.2cm length, it’s barely bigger than a 3.5″ HDD. It’s also very light with just 660 grams.

On the inside, the DS419slim features a Marvell Amada 385 88F6820 dual-core processor. The CPU runs at 1.33GHz and comes with hardware encryption engine. The CPU is coupled with 512MB DDR3L memory which isn’t a lot, but plenty for this kind of system.

Connection Options

The DS419slim is a small device and as such, there isn’t room for a whole lot of connections. Still, Synology managed to add two Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 LAN ports as well as two USB 3.0 ports. One of the USB ports is located on the front while the other is on the rear side.

With the USB ports, it’s both quick and easy to backup data either way. Use them to make backups of what’s on your NAS or what’s on your portable drives and devices. The choice is yours in the end.

Personal Cloud or Media Server?

Or, why not both? With the Synology DS419slim both is possible.

DS419slim helps you easily manage your multimedia content and share it across all sort of platforms. With Video Station, you can organize your personal digital video library using comprehensive media information. Audio Station comes with Internet radio, lossless audio format support, and provides music playback via DLNA and AirPlay devices. Photo Station’s intuitive design allows professional photographers to effortlessly organize photos into customized categories, smart albums, and link them to social media sites with just a few clicks. Those are the three classics.

As a brand-new photo solution for personal and home use, Synology Moments promises users a modern browsing experience by offering mobile photo backup, photo sharing, image recognition and similar photo detection.

Remote connection is as easy as the rest with Synology. They have their own DDNS service which is free and it’s called QuickConnect. With it, you don’t need to pay extra or have any technical knowledge in order to connect to your NAS while you’re away. There’s also a whole row of apps available for all the function, ready to install on your mobile phone or tablet.

Your Choice of Drives

As with any modern NAS, you have the choice of drive. You can either install SSDs or HDDs in the DS419slim – as long as they’re standard 2.5mm drives. Even the larger 15mm drives should fit which are available with up to 5TB. With that in mind, you can install up to 20TB in total in this tiny NAS.

So while this NAS is tiny and unusual, it can still easily offer a lot of capacity. An amount that is plenty for most home situations.

A NAS Powered by DSM

Since the DS419slim is a Synology NAS, it’s naturally powered by the DSM operating system. The OS is quite evolved and one of the best on the market. It’s packed with features and more can be added through the plethora of available apps.

A highlight for the DS419slim will definetly be the Hyper Backup solution.

Synology Hyper Backup provides multi-version backup with block-level incremental backup and cross-version deduplication. It optimises storage utilization and allows data to be backed up to multiple destinations such as local shared folders, external hard drives, network shared folders, rsync servers, and public cloud services.

Feature Highlights

• A 4-bay small footprint NAS for building a smart home with 2.5” drive support
• Dual-core CPU with hardware encryption engine
• Over 220 MB/s reading, 94 MB/s writing through dual Gigabit Link Aggregation with failover support
• Effortless management of music, video and photos as a personal multimedia library
• Anywhere access with iOS and Android ready mobile apps
• Running on Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM)