For the past few years, Synology’s DiskStation NAS lineup hasn’t received much hardware updates compared to the competition, but still, the company’s Diskstation NAS still remains a popular choice among tech enthusiast, businesses and professionals all thanks to its great DSM operating system and data protection features

The 4-bay DiskStation DS925+ couldn’t have arrived at a better time with increased competition in the space, not only it now sports 2.5GbE connectivity as standard, but it also comes with a more powerful quad-core AMD Ryzen V1500B processor that runs applications faster, while users can easily expand their storage with the next DX525 expansion unit with a modern USB-C port  that replaces the aging e-SATA port.

The DS925+ looks identical to its predecessor in hardware design except for the model number printed on the front.

However, things are slightly different on the back with some unfortunate downgrades, although you get faster dual 2.5GbE ports, the network upgrade slot has been unfortunately removed which you can no longer slot in an optional 10GbE PCIe card, but having dual 2.5GbE should suffice for most users looking at this NAS.

One thing I wished the DS925+ had is faster USB 10Gbps ports, as it has stuck with the standard USB 5Gbps port for far too long and it limits faster storage to be connected to the NAS, which greatly affects transfer speeds especially if you want to backup an external SSD that can reach 10Gbps speeds.

Under the DS925+, you get to M.2 2280 slots that runs at PCIe 3.0 speeds as usual, which is plenty fast for caching or to be used as a storage pool.

The drive bays remain a similar design as before which is basically toolless if you were to install 3.5-inch drives, the familiar ECC SODIMM slot continues to be located at an awkward position where you will need to remove the fourth drive bay to access it, a 4GB DDR4 ECC SODIMM has been preinstalled and can be expanded to 32GB if you intend to run a lot of containers and virtual machines.

One of the most controversial things that Synology did with its 2025 NAS lineup is limiting users from installing third-party hard drives, you get an error message for doing so and you can’t install DSM on them.

Although it might seem like an ‘Apple’ move, Synology has defended that claim with an explanation back in my interview with them at COMPUTEX that they did this in order to ensure optimal performance for their NAS, as using non-Synology hard drives can impact the performance and experience that a Synology NAS can offer.

But still, this isn’t going to make some people happy as it limits the choice of hard drives you can use on the DS925+. However, if you are upgrading from an older Synology NAS, you will be glad that the drives will work as usual once you plug them into the DS925+ as DSM is already installed on the existing drives.

Synology says that it is already working with third-party hard drive manufacturers to certify their drives to be compatible with current DiskStation products, but it still insists on using their own drives as it delivers better transfer speeds and endurance.

We are provided with two Synology HAT3300 Plus 4TB drives for this review, the first time setup is effortless just like any Synology NAS by just entering find.synology.com into your browser address bar, follow a few steps and you will be up and running in less than 10 minutes.

In terms of transfer speeds, we managed to get up to 280MB/s of transfer over a 2.5Gbps connection, which is significantly faster

DSM has surely set a good standard for many NAS models today when it comes to its user friendliness and features, the DS925+ comes with a huge library of packages that expands the functionality of the NAS, you can easily transform it into a media server with Plex, save backups from cloud services such as Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive, and even run a virtual machine such as an Ubuntu Linux server without the need to set up an expensive local server if you are doing local app hosting or development.

The most attractive part of owning a Synology NAS is the folder encryption technology and centralized Synology C2 service. The Synology DS925+ can have shared folders encrypted and decrypted with an external USB device, you can also do a WORM (Write Once, Read Many) on a folder to protect files from being modified, deleted and renamed for a specified retention period.

As for Synology’s C2 Storage, it is a subscription service that backs up your NAS’ files to Synology’s centralized cloud storage that ensures high availability of your data, so that you will be able to access them anywhere around the world even have these data made available if you own Synology NAS at other sites.

The Synology DS925+ is definitely a step-up from its predecessor two years ago in many ways, though it still loses out to the competition when it comes to actual raw performance due to an aging CPU, the use of ECC DDR4 RAM also increases the cost of ownership if you want to expand more RAM for the purpose of running multiple containers and virtual machines, but what you will truly value about it is Synology’s great DSM operating system and data protection features that gives you a peace of mind.