How to choose a Synology NAS for your business: a practical guide

NAS stands for Network Attached Storage — a storage device connected to the company network and reachable from any computer in the office. Synology is the market leader in this segment, with solutions suitable for anything from 2-person companies to corporations with thousands of users. This guide is for SMEs that want to start or upgrade their data protection.

What a NAS is and why it matters for SMEs

A NAS works like a small file server in your office, but it's much simpler to set up and manage than a traditional server. The advantages for a small business:

• Centralised storage — all the company's important files in one place, reachable by every employee on the network
• Automated backup — you set it up once and the backup runs by itself at night, with no human intervention
• Immutable snapshots — versions of the data that ransomware can't overwrite, even with network access
• Low power consumption — a Synology NAS uses 15–30W, compared with 200–400W for a traditional server
• Scalability — you can add drives or upgrade to a larger model as the company grows

Synology series: what's the difference

Synology groups its models into series by purpose. The ones relevant to SMEs:

• J series — entry level, for personal use or micro-businesses with 1–3 users. Limited performance, no ECC RAM support. Examples: DS223j, DS124.
• Value series (no suffix) — suitable for small businesses with 5–15 users. Good performance, full DSM interface. Examples: DS224+, DS423+.
• Plus series (+) — recommended for SMEs with 10–50 users, heavy backup and many simultaneous users. More powerful CPU, ECC RAM support on some models. Examples: DS923+, DS1522+.
• XS/XS+ series — enterprise, for large companies or demanding workloads (virtualisation, databases). More than most SMEs need.

The practical recommendation: for a company with 5–20 employees, a 4-bay Plus (+) model is the best choice. It offers enough performance for continuous backup, supports expansion and offers good value for money.

How many bays you need

Bays are the slots you put the drives into. The minimum recommended number depends on your backup strategy:

• 2 bays — the minimum for RAID 1 (mirroring). Protection against a single drive failure, but no room to expand. Suitable for companies with under 1 TB of data in total.
• 4 bays — the recommended configuration for SMEs. It allows RAID 5 or SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) with fault tolerance and plenty of usable space. You can start with 2 drives and add more as needed.
• 6+ bays — for companies with large data volumes (over 10 TB) or that also use the NAS for other services (virtualisation, video surveillance).

One important point: the number of bays doesn't directly determine capacity. A 4-bay NAS with 8 TB drives offers more usable space than a 6-bay one with 2 TB drives.

RAID is not backup

This is the most common misconception among first-time NAS buyers. RAID (including RAID 1, RAID 5, SHR) protects against the hardware failure of a drive — nothing more.

RAID doesn't protect you against:

• Accidental deletion of files (the deleted file disappears from every drive at once)
• Ransomware (it encrypts the data on the NAS just like on the computer, in real time)
• Fire, flood or physical theft of the NAS
• Logical data corruption (a corrupted file is replicated to every drive in the RAID)

RAID is an availability component, not a backup. A complete system combines RAID on the NAS with immutable local snapshots and encrypted offsite cloud backup.

Next steps after you buy

Buying the NAS is only the first step. A working backup system needs:

1. Installing DSM (DiskStation Manager — Synology's operating system) and the initial RAID/SHR setup
2. Enabling Snapshot Replication — hourly or daily immutable snapshots for ransomware protection
3. Configuring Hyper Backup — automatic backup of the data to a cloud service (Wasabi, Backblaze B2, Amazon S3)
4. Setting up alerts — email or SMS notifications when a backup fails or a drive reports SMART errors
5. The restore test — you simulate data loss and check that you can recover files from the snapshots and from the cloud backup

Each step can be set up without advanced IT knowledge — Synology's DSM interface is one of the most accessible in the industry. If you'd rather hand over the setup and monitoring entirely, that's exactly what we do.