I have for the last couple of weeks been using both the DS212 and DS212+. Check out my review of the DS212+ here. So far I have enjoyed both of these two units and there is a main difference between these two units and that is that the DS212+ has an extra eSata port to add better connectivity and speedier transfer between the two units.
With both of these two I have installed two 2 TB drives into each NAS and used Synology RAID setup so that I have that extra redundancy just in case something happens. For those of you who do not understand how ti works it is a way where you have all your data on your drive and have the second drive mirror that drive so that in case one drive dies you have everything still on the drive. To check out the status of then drive you can load up Synology Diskstation Manager and check out how it works. If there is a green text everything is ok with your drive but if it is in red text the drive is in risk of failing and that you may need to hurry up and replace the drive. The first time I used a NAS I almost lost all the data on one drive just because I did not listening or reading what was happening to the drive.
With both of these two drives I have average around 100 mb/s when doing reading tests and around 50 mb/s when I performed writing tests. So far these two drives has performed exactly as Synology has described them but if I should complain about something is that it can sometimes start beeping on me but when I read up on the issue it seems that it comes from the drives beeping but when I check out the condition the drives that currently are in my NAS it says that everything is in good condition. So if it happens to you just be aware on that something may happen.
A cool function with the DS212 and DS212 is the SD card slot on the front of the device. Insert an SD card with data and you can store these data on your NAS. Cool function, especially if you have pictures on your camera and that you can this way access these pictures on all of the computers in your network. I have used this function just so that I can transfer pictures from my Olympus camera and so far it been working perfectly.
Both these two have lights on the front so that you can see how the status, LAN, Disk 1, Disk 2, and Power. Both of these two supports hot swap hard drives and requires no more then 19W while in operations mode and no more then 8W while it is in hibernation mode.. The NAS devices also have noise damping features with a noise output of 19.8 dB.
