I still use my DS211+ that I bought back in April 2011. If you ask me it's been amazing that they've been supplying updates for it this long. It's been almost exactly 13 years. I only use it for straight nightly backups etc, nothing fancy. I also don't expose it to the internet for any reason. But it's been a workhorse. I'll definitely pony up for the current version of the 2 disk + series whenever it's time to set it out to pasture. For now it's still humming along.

The concern I see is small to mid- sized businesses that purchased these devices as amongst the best bang/buck ratio in their day for easy storage additions. I used to be an admin for one and we loved these devices.

Having said that, these things are 10+years old at this point and SSD (*much* faster RAID rebuild rates)  has been an option for a while now so really many of these companies should have moved on to something newer by now.

Ok, lets get real for a moment. Can we?

'Network Attached Storage' - NAS systems sit on your LAN offering both storage space for other attached devices and sometimes applications and other services.

The devices can be configured to be ether 'wide open' (IE: will communicate and share stored data with anything that can communicate with it) to various forms of 'lock down' requiring password protected 'accounts' to access data or change the device settings.

So there are a few assumptions here. (in no order)
- ether the data is valuable or the loss of it would create a undue hardship
- 'bad actors' are interested in ether accessing or destroying the data (for fun or profit)
- ALL security can eventually be breached requiring endless updates to mitigate threats


Forgetting for the moment that countless other security functions may (or NOT!) need to be breached before a 'bad actor' gains access to your LAN that has one of these NAS systems attached the owners of one of these devices may have much much bigger problems then the version of software/firmware running on this device.