Although one of Qnap’s home devices, the Qnap TS-262 is surprisingly well specified for a two-bay device. It has just the one Ethernet port, so no redundancy, but as it’s a 2.5GbE port rather than gigabit you avoid one potential bottleneck. Given that this standard is becoming more and more popular on consumer switches and routers, it’s nice to see this fast connection.

If you do need more speed, there’s a 10GbE port upgrade available via the PCI-E slot, which is accessible when the case is unscrewed. That’s the only time you’ll need a screwdriver, as everything else is accessible via screw-free entry.

For example, pop out both of the hard disk caddies and you’ll see that dual M.2 2280 NVMe PCI-E Gen3 slots are available. These use a simple clip to hold the SSDs in place, so are easy to deal with. Hard disks simply slide into the slot.

As with all Qnap NAS devices, the TS-262 runs its QTS operating system so is compatible with the full range of services that this provides, including the ability to create your own personal storage cloud. There’s an Intel Celeron N4505 processor and 4GB of RAM (non-upgradable), which should prove enough for even heavy use.

There are some extra features you don’t often find on rival NAS devices, including an HDMI 2.0 output. When paired with the compatible remote control, this NAS can be turned into a media streamer, playing video directly from its hard disk. If you have a large collection of films, this might be your best option, but a sleeker option is to install a media server and stream directly from the NAS.

Running over a standard gigabit Ethernet connection, the Qnap TS-262 fell behind the Synology DS723+, when we benchmarked using 22TB hard disks and dual 1TB NVMe drives. However, upgrade that connection to 2.5GbE and things get better, particularly with larger file sizes: running the ATTO benchmark with 2MB files, the TS-262 jumped from 100MB/sec read speeds to 210MB/sec.

There was little difference in the PCMark 10 Storage test, which uses different file transfers and is less dependent on connection speeds.

Synology’s systems are arguably easier to use, but if you want more straightforward file and media sharing, locally and via the cloud, then this NAS is excellent value and fast, particularly when its 2.5GbE port is used.

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The DS223 sits almost at the bottom of Synology’s huge NAS range, with only the single-slot DS124 and the more basic two-slot DS223j variant sitting below it. Accordingly, it’s not particularly well specified, with only two SATA drive bays and no NVMe slots. There’s 2GB of RAM onboard, which can’t be upgraded, while all the processing work is done by a lowly four-core Realtek CPU clocked at 1.7GHz. Perhaps just as significantly, this NAS has just a single 1GbE network port, immediately putting it at a disadvantage to 2.5GbE devices when it comes to fast file serving.

Still, the DS223 is designed and built with Synology’s usual quality. Pull off the front panel and its two drive caddies slide in and out smoothly – they’re tool-less for 3.5in disks, but you’ll need to screw 2.5in devices in place. We fitted two 4TB Synology disks, turned the NAS on, then connected to its web interface to create a RAID1 array and format it with the Btrfs file system.

While other NAS manufacturers continue to improve their software, Synology remains the master. Its DiskStation Manager (DSM) operating system strikes almost the perfect balance between functionality and ease of use. Storage Manager makes it intuitive to create and manage storage pools and volumes, while all the network, user and other settings are gathered together in Control Panel.

You can enhance and add to the DS223’s functionality through the Package Center, which at the time of our review offered 107 apps covering a range of multimedia, backup, business and communication roles. However, this NAS drive’s modest power means it could struggle to run multiple demanding apps at once.

This NAS was an underwhelming performer in our tests anyway, even compared to other devices limited to a 1GbE interface. In ATTO Disk Benchmark it was around 20% slower than other Synology NAS enclosures for a 4KB file size, and about 10% slower for 16KB files. Even though it caught up when moving 2MB files, it still managed only 111MB/sec writes and 113MB/sec reads – about the maximum possible over gigabit Ethernet. Surprisingly, however, the DS223 was quite competitive when writing files from a Windows 11 PC.

We love this NAS drive’s simplicity and comparative ease of use, but it’s significantly more expensive than QNAP’s TS-233. It’s quicker, but if speed is important we’d recommend spending more on a 2.5GbE alternative such as the QNAP TS-264.

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