Synology Diskstation DS216play is the latest 2 bay NAS designed for home users and especially as a media server. Read my review to know more

Synology has the operating system DSM 6 installed on Diskstation DS216Play. DSM 6 has many features and application and you can find the full list below Packages in Download center for DS216Play.

Installation

Synology Diskstation DS216Play do not have tool-less installation as some other newer diskstation.

You need to unscrew two screws at the back. Then slide the side panel off.

Then you slide the hard disks in place and secure it with screws to the DS216Play. Slide the panel back in place and screw it fast in the back.

With 2.5″ hard disks, you need to screw them first to a disk holder before you can screw the disk holder to the diskstation. The disk holder is sold separately.

You can read more about the installation and setup of diskstation in a post I wrote. I have written about tool-less installation in that post, but the first time boot and setup are the same. You can also see two videos from Synology.

4K Ultra HD video transcoding

DS216Play is powered by a hardware accelerated transcode engine and supports H.264/H.265 1080P and H.265 4k codecs. It allows you to transcode videos on the fly to make them suitable for all screens and devices. support any devices you want to watch the video on such as media players or smartphones.

Powered by a hardware-accelerated transcoding engine, DS216play supports H.264/H.265 1080p and H.265 4K codecs, allows you to transcode 4K videos to 1080p, making them suitable for all screens and bandwidths whether they are local media players or remote mobile devices. In addition, you can also stream original 4K resolution videos to your multimedia player or 4K TV within a local network environment. 4K transcoding is available only through Synology’s Video Station, DS video, Media Server

The built-in floating-point unit enhances the overall capability of the main CPU and is particularly advantageous in speeding up thumbnail creations when uploading a lot of photos or videos

DLNA Certified^® media server

Synology Diskstation DS216play can act as a DLNA Certified media server. You can stream multimedia content such as photos, videos, and music to any DLNA compliant device located anywhere in the world.

Features and Specifications

• Powerful dual-core 1,5 GHz CPU with H.265 codec support. 
• DLNA certified for media streaming
• Powered by Synology Disk Station Manager (DSM)
• 4K Ultra HD video transcoding on the fly

Customer Reviews and Scores

I found 8 customer reviews at the time of writing and they awarded Synology Diskstation DS416 4.8 stars out of a possible 5 on average.

The customer reviews on Amazon are very positive overall. The diskstation is still new and with 8 customer reviews, it is still early. The biggest complaint is:

In general I really like Synology products. They just work and are easy to use. I have previously bought the 1511+ and 213 models. This 216play model was to be used mainly as a media server (movies!) and therefore I selected the play version because it had hardware transcoding. I got it installed and everything went fine until I tried to install Plex Media Server (PMS) – which I have used on my prior two models. This particular version does not support (PMS)!!?!?! PMS is the defacto standard for media servers and the fact that 216play does not support it is a big no-go for me. None of the online documentation on synology.com etc. mentioned anything about that. I spent a lot of time checking that the cpu was powerfull enough to transcode 1080p movies etc. but it never crossed my mind to also check if it was compatible with PMS (because the previous versions were). […..]

This is correct. Plex will now not support NAS models with the CPU DS216Play have. So you have to use a version of Plex that will no longer be updated or use Synology’s own applications that are good products.

Another review on Amazon.com is:

Had the unit for a couple of weeks now, used in a mostly Apple product home. I have 2x4TB WD Red drives loaded inside running in a “Smart Raid” configuration.

The setup was very straightforward. I’m using it for a variety of reasons: time machine backup from a laptop, file archival, storage for remote access and video steaming. There are a handful of Synology published iOS apps that help you with each one of those tasks when you’re at home. It’s pretty convenient to also be able to access all of your files remotely via a browser. The NAS itself is hooked up via ethernet to an Asus AC68R router. You can get pretty consistent 15-20 MBps transfer speeds over wireless N, and about 35-40 MBps over AC. I haven’t tried to gauge transfer speeds over a wired connection yet, but so far the bottleneck has been my home WiFi and not the NAS unit chocking due to lack of processing power or memory. Synology claims ~100MBps read/write, and that would basically run up against the limit of most HDDs.

[…..]

The drive is fairly quiet when idle, but does produce some audible noise when in use. No surprises there, it’s a mini computer with two spinning disks and a fan inside. What is a surprise is how little power this thing uses. If you’re on the fence about using a mini tower as your NAS versus an actual NAS box, consider that you’ll probably use 10X more power to run a mini tower. I’m a big fan of this NAS and really wish I would’ve done it sooner.

I have not seen any more complaint about this error, both on Amazon or Synology forums so I believe this is fixed also or is just an error on his side.

Backup solutions and file server

File Station is a fast and secure feature for sharing and managing your files stored on DS216play. Just drag-n-drop and upload data from Mac or PC. Advanced filters make it easy to search for documents, photos, or videos. With built-in FTP or email clients, DS216play lets you organize and share files through an advanced web application effortlessly. You can even share files and folders with others by simply sending a link. Files can be reached on mobile devices via the companion mobile app DS file. HTTPS, SSL/TLS encryption, and link expiry dates also ensure file sharing over the Internet is highly secure

Synology DS216play can serve as a centralized backup target. Whether you are a Windows or Mac user, you can back up everything on your computer directly to Synology NAS using Cloud Station. Whenever you modify a file, the changes are backed up to DS216play automatically. Mac users also enjoy native Apple^® Time Machine support. You can also back up data from your DS216play to another DiskStation, rsync servers, external drives, or even Amazon^® S3, Glacier cloud service, Microsoft Azure, SFR, and hicloud. “Backup & Replication” allows you to schedule backup tasks and restore the server to any particular point in time while minimizing storage consumption and processing time by saving only the specific data block that has been changed between versions

 Conclusion

Synology Diskstation DS416 is designed for home users and small companies and offer you a NAS with many features and high performance for its value. DS416 is a good all around NAS with good storage capacity, features rich and a good media server. If you want a great media station or a top-end NAS you need to look at the specialized NAS.