DiskStation DS923+

The DS923+ is Synology's mid-range 4-bay desktop NAS and the model we recommend by default for offices and villas storing under 50 TB. The AMD Ryzen Embedded R1600 is the right CPU for a NAS — two cores and four threads, ECC memory support, and enough headroom for Synology's first-party services (Active Backup for Business doing daily incremental backups of every Windows endpoint, Synology Drive replacing Dropbox for the team, Hyper Backup pushing nightly off-site to a second DS923+ or to AWS S3 Glacier). DSM 7.2 unlocks dual NVMe storage pools — meaning the two M.2 slots can be configured either as a read/write SSD cache (which is what we do for office shares with lots of small files) or as a flash-only storage pool for Docker volumes, photo libraries or active video editing. Memory is ECC SO-DIMM, expandable to 32 GB on DSM 7.2 — we recommend going to 16 GB minimum if running Synology Surveillance Station for 10+ cameras or Container Manager hosting Vaultwarden / Immich / Plex side-by-side. The 10 GbE upgrade path via the E10G22-T1-Mini PCIe-style card is important for shops moving video footage between the NAS and editor workstations — without it you're capped at ~110 MB/s per single GbE link, which becomes painful at 4K ProRes. We stock the NIC separately and pre-install it on request.