I think a product of this caliber and complexity warrants a lengthy review so don't expect this to be short and sweet.
I was looking for a NAS for home use and for awhile was thinking about building my own. That endeavor was a little bit too much for me at the time so I decided to find a prebuilt solution. It turns out that this unit was exactly what I needed to get me started and help teach me more about networking and networked storage.
Setup:
Out of the box, the Synology DS918+ is pretty lightweight but it feels sturdy enough. The case is made of a durable plastic that doesn't feel cheap per se but it does feel like plastic so nothing special. The design is sleek and attractive though and despite me being a fully fledged dweeb, I appreciate that it looks a lot less "aggressive" and "techy" than some other NAS's on the market.
I purchased WD Red NAS drives for my unit and they were incredibly easy to install. The drives just clamp on to the trays and slide in. That simple.
Connecting the device was as easy as plugging in power and ethernet. The whole unit has less than a 50watt TDP which is REMARKABLE if you ask me. The unit also runs quiet as a mouse. I can have it right on my desk next to my Microphone and it doesn't pick it up at all. I wouldnt know it was on if it weren't for the LED's.
Now getting into the meat of things. Actually setting it up. Once you boot it up and have it networked, you go to the Synology website, create an account, and it walks you through everything. You may have to download and install the discovery tool but it's lightweight and you will never need it once you're set up so you can uninstall it right after. Not that big of a deal for me.
The walk-through is incredibly simple. Even people who struggle to operate a television remote could follow along with their guide. It takes you through getting the drives ready, naming the device, network discovery settings, the whole kit and kaboodle. Keep in mind that formatting the drives and preparing them for RAID will probably take you a couple of hours or more.
Features:
So what can this thing do? Well for me it does everything that I need it to do and more. On top of that, it makes doing those things easy and my curiosity in the more complicated things it can do has only helped me learn and refine my networking knowledge and experience which is very valuable to me as a newbie in my IT career.
First and foremost, the RAID set up. One of the things that was extremely attractive to me was Synology's Hybrid RAID. This allows users to throw in any hardrive of any size they want for their RAID array which is NOT something conventional RAID would ever allow you to do. Even an experienced tech guru might find this feature attractive against building and managing their own NAS. The unit also supports conventional RAID 1,2 and 5.
On top of that, creating and managing user accounts so other people can use your device is a breeze. Something that normally would not be if you were thinking about incorporating Active Directory and folder permissions into a server that you had built yourself. Using Synology's proprietary solution essentially taught me how this architecture works while saving me time from actually doing it at home which is FANTASTIC.
I started off in IT as a web developer and this little NAS actually served a purpose to that end which I was not expecting. The app store has everything a rookie or experienced developer would want on their server, with support for PhPMyAdmin, Docker, Mail Server, Apache, Joomla, NODE.Js, ect. bundled and organized right on your NAS. This is awesome and I love playing around with all of these features in an easily managed environment.
It also works seamlessly with Plex which is an extremely popular and powerful home media streaming tool that I know is the reason for a lot of people looking at these units. I also use it to stream my music library to Foobar on other devices and it works wonderfully for that as well.
The QuickConnect feature also allows you to share your NAS online which is awesome. Though the less robust approach of configuring port forwarding for specific applications was a bit of a challenge to me at first, it also proved to be pretty easy compared to other things that I have worked on since I bought this unit.
The dashboard also features real time tracking of network traffic, CPU/RAM usage, users and storage health which is awesome.
One last note before the final thoughts, this product has really good documentation behind it. Any issues that I have had setting up the more complicated features on this unit were easily found on the online forums and communities for Synology. This made otherwise tedious techy jargon really easy to find and digest, and again, helped me learn a lot about NAS's, servers, and networking to where I feel confident I could build my own in the future.
Final thoughts:
I have had this unit for roughly 8-9 months now and it has not given me any issues. It runs perfectly all the time, my data feels safe and secure, the features are plenty, and it saves me a lot of time that a custom server would not have whenever I want to make changes or learn something new about serving files and networking. I am hoping this product lasts me a very long time and I feel confident in believing that it will. When I look to expand my storage yet again for my insanely large library of media and files, I will be looking at what Synology has to offer first.
Update July 2021:
Wow it has already been 5 years since I purchased this thing. How time flies!
It is still operating the same as it was when I first bought it. This thing is a champion. I have done almost everything imaginable with this thing. I've played around with about 65% of the offered packages for it, docker, endpoint analytics, mail server, you name it, dhcp, node, the list goes on. It still runs quiet and fast. Never had any issues, failure, or concerns for that matter. It's about time to upgrade it's capacity again and I am confident it will handle it just fine. Also, since purchasing this, I have learned a LOT. I was able to teach myself so much about administration and infrastructure because of this simple little device and have developed an IT career because of it. If you are an budding admin or just an average Joe that wants to play around with Plex or store your photos and documents on your network, just get one.
| RAM | 2 GB |
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