I know, I know. I got the Synology DS223j just a month ago. However, I ran across a pretty un-surmountable roadblock with it. It can’t run Virtual machines, which I really want to do. So I returned it and got a Synology DS224+ instead, even though it meant having a device with an Intel Processor.

The first thing I noticed moving from the DS223j to the DS224+ is how much uglier it is.

While the DS223j was beautiful and elegant, the DS224+ is an ugly block which has no business being on a living room shelf.

Anyway, function over form. And functionally, the DS224+ is superior to the DS23j in almost every way.

The first thing you will notice is that the DS224+ is entirely tool-less. No need to open the entire chassis to plug in the hard disks. The front cover pops out and you can just slot the hard drives in. Also, the drives are hot-swappable.

I think not opening the chassis is good in a way that you don’t accidentally nick critical components fiddling around its insides with a screw driver.

The second big upgrade is that you can bump up the (2GB) RAM by an additional 4GB, bringing it up to 6GB. The additional RAM allows the Synology to run VMs, among other things.

While the RAM utilisation on the DS223j was always hovering between the 60-80% marks, the DS224+ mostly stays below 20% with my standard applications (DSM, Plex, HomeBridge, Download Center etc) running.

The NAS also comes with an extra USB 3.0 port, an additional ethernet port (10/100/1000) and a one touch USB copy feature, none of which I care for.

My biggest surprise was that I found the DS224+ to run cooler than the DS223j (Based on the un-scientific measure of the warmth of air exiting its backside). Especially, because going from an ARM processor to an x86/64 processor, I expected exactly the opposite.

A quick comparison on Synology’s website confirms that not only does the DS224+ consumes less power, it also emits less heat under load.

But why is that? Isn’t the ARM architecture known for its power efficiency? A Quick Look at the processor specs doesn’t make things any clearer.

NAS	CPU	Specifications
DS223j	Realtek RTD1619B	12nm process, 5W TDP
DS224+	Intel Celeron J4125	14nm process, 10W TDP

Clearly, the ARM CPU is manufactured using a newer process and has half the TDP of the Intel. This means that either the remaining power consumption is from the other NAS components or that the software is not as optimised for the ARMv8 architecture.

Or that the Realtek chip is actually quite inefficient and running closer to its TDP for the same loads.

Either ways, I tried a few days, but couldn’t get used to how ugly the DS224+ was, so I returned it and went back to DS223j.