Synology Free SMS Notifications
Qnap lately released their new notifications panel which made people ask does Synology have a similar service. The answer is a yes. You can be notified about the things happening to your NAS over Email, SMS and Web browser push messages on your taskbar. The most convenient type of notification people find simple SMS. But is there a way to have a free service. There is something called Clickatell they offer free and paid service. If you are happy to be limited to 16 messages per month this is all you need. To be honest, it might not actually be even a one sms per month. You will want to be notified only in critical situations like drive failure or network failure. So this is a perfect free solution for you.
Register here: https://www.clickatell.com/sign-up
You can enable SMS notifications in order for Synology NAS to send you notification messages via SMS when status changes or errors occur to the system, such as connection loss, fan behavior change, power failure, storage volume running out of space, or back/restoration failure, etc.
Read more: How to Here
What can I connect to a NAS?
Wireless Speaker Sonos
The great thing about Sonos is that you don't need to pay for music subscription service. With the cheapest NAS at home like DS115j or any other, you can have your backups done for all of your devices and still use your network drive as a Sonos music library. Sonos will connect to your NAS via your network and let access your provided music library. If you have little more of IT knowledge, you can even set up your Alexa or Sonos with Alexa built in to play music on your voice commands ("Alexa! Ask DS Audio to Play Music!").
Casting devices
Nowadays it is so cheap to upgrade your old TV and make it smart. All you need is Google Chrome or EZcast alternative plugged into your HDMI port at the back of your TV. Now you have great functionality added to your TV to send a video file directly from your NAS to a TV. No need for wires and chargers and other mess. You can use your phone as a remote to go to your movies or family videos and cast that content on your TV during family or friend gatherings.
Apple TV
Amazon Fire TV
You may not have a smartphone, or you just simply prefer to control your content with a remote in that case Amazon Fire TV will be a great addon to get to your TV. It also plugs into your HDMI port and will play content from your NAS to a TV. No wires no mess.
nVidia Shield TV
It gets even better! If you want some more entertainment and all previously mentioned functions - nVidia TV is a great thing to get. You can use it for playing games and watching movies from your NAS. The greatest thing is - shield TV does video transcoding. So even if you have a cheap NAS with a weak CPU, in a combination of shield TV you can now automatically on the fly change video file size and format for a destination device. It is a great way to reduce network load and let older devices to play video content which normally was not supported on the device.
