SauRoNZA
Honorary Master
The DS218 arrived in subtle but great packaging with a handle on top of nicely wrapped in thin foam to make it feel a little bit special with the device first and foremost.
Taking it out of the foam wrapping I was surprised at how light it was and soon discovered it's mostly plastic in construction where for some reason I expected it to be metal.
The unit splits apart in an oddly unbalanced fashion and then you can fit the two 3.5-inch hard drives inside or make use of a bracket to fit a 2.5-inch unit. Strangely this isn't a screwless system and some manual labour is recommended, but not really required as it all fits quite snugly. Oddly you also get screws to close up the actual unit from the outside, even though it has sliding clips to hold it together.
I purposely put in one drive I knew was a bit dodgy and another known to be working and was quite impressed to have the unit beeping at me reporting an error state within a minute of powering it up.
Operation is super quiet, especially considering I put the unit inside a closing cupboard where my HP Microserver had previously gone a little bit nuts with fan noise.
First-time connection to the Synology Diskstation runs you through some basics of the interface and then automatically formats the drives in EXT4 format as it seems to install the Operating System call DiskStationManager onto the disks themselves and doesn't retain it on some internal storage. This leads me to believe that the Internet might be required, but I didn't specifically test this at the time of installation.
By default, it mirrors the two drives so that you can have a single drive failure and retain your data on the other drive. This also means you want to use two drives of the same size otherwise you'll be limited to the smallest drive.
Synology QuickConnect is their remote access service that basically skips the drama of port forwarding by talking to their own upstream service and giving you a domain to connect to. This was pretty simple stuff to setup and great for a less savvy user, but probably not enough for an advanced user wanting to run and host multiple services.
Interestingly enough I run a DuckDNS domain and LetsEncrypt alongside it and the moment the QuickConnect system went live on my network it overrode that completely and the Synology interface just took over all domain calls internally and externally. I couldn't figure it out and even disabling the service didn't have much effect.
The interface is very detailed with loads and loads of nerdy options but this may be a little too much for normal people or not so tech-savvy users. It would have been a nice feature to see an option presented at first connection to choose a Lite vs Hardcore interface.
There's a great Windows Explorer-like app pre-installed called File Station that allows for managing folders and files and connections which is really a nice addition compared to many other options I've seen out there.
I was particularly surprised with the ability to mount both NFS and Samba shares from external sources which expand it's limitations in 2-drives only storage somewhat. Although I didn't test it I'm sure one could use the multiple USB ports to add additional drives in this way as well.
Even more interesting is that you could make the DS218j (and presumably any other DS product) your Router by letting it dial your PPPoE connection as well as manage a DHCP server and even as Traffic Control options to manage bandwidth.
That goes even further in that you can make it a wireless access point as well by connecting up a USB wireless card.
Loads of security and firewalling options as well and something I would definitely take a deeper look at potentially using it as a Gateway device in the future.
There are even options to join it to a domain or LDAP server and using SSO.
The only thing I've found to be missing actually are VPN server/client options, but I guess they kind of take care of the former with their QuickConnect service.
Sadly this is not the version that supports 4K Transcoding which is a feature I was keenly looking forward to having taken the plunge with a 4K TV and lots of 4K media, but still having some older 1080p devices in the house.
There are plenty of Cloud Service options available as well so you could happily sync the most popular ones to your local internal network cloud and not rely so heavily on an active internet connection or local device storage.
Being a 2-drive only unit this is more of a backup solution or storage for data you are ready to lose. If you are looking for redundancy and larger storage arrays then I would advise seeking out the 4-bay Synology options available where RAID5 is an option.
The DS218 only mirrors two drives which means your storage volumes are cut in half and total storage is somewhat limited by the size of the two drives. Expansion isn't directly possible and I'm pretty sure RAID5 wouldn't be configurable over USB externals.
I was hopeful of seeing some Docker support but I suspect that is specifically removed due to lower processing and memory combination here. There are however quite a lot of apps (called packages) available from many vendors.
My favourite being Plex Media Server which I quickly tested and worked well enough as long as you kept it strictly to 1080p or less and didn't require much in the way of transcoding.
Conclusion
Overall I think this is a great device for a reasonably light and maybe not so IT-oriented user who just wants a place to backup their files and make them remotely available at the same time.
I personally wouldn't use it for redundant storage, purely due to the size limitations of only having a mirror of two drives, but a truly surprising suite of networking tools provided might see me use it for all the other things it didn't even market itself for.
Likes
Dislikes
Taking it out of the foam wrapping I was surprised at how light it was and soon discovered it's mostly plastic in construction where for some reason I expected it to be metal.
The unit splits apart in an oddly unbalanced fashion and then you can fit the two 3.5-inch hard drives inside or make use of a bracket to fit a 2.5-inch unit. Strangely this isn't a screwless system and some manual labour is recommended, but not really required as it all fits quite snugly. Oddly you also get screws to close up the actual unit from the outside, even though it has sliding clips to hold it together.
I purposely put in one drive I knew was a bit dodgy and another known to be working and was quite impressed to have the unit beeping at me reporting an error state within a minute of powering it up.
Operation is super quiet, especially considering I put the unit inside a closing cupboard where my HP Microserver had previously gone a little bit nuts with fan noise.
First-time connection to the Synology Diskstation runs you through some basics of the interface and then automatically formats the drives in EXT4 format as it seems to install the Operating System call DiskStationManager onto the disks themselves and doesn't retain it on some internal storage. This leads me to believe that the Internet might be required, but I didn't specifically test this at the time of installation.
By default, it mirrors the two drives so that you can have a single drive failure and retain your data on the other drive. This also means you want to use two drives of the same size otherwise you'll be limited to the smallest drive.
Synology QuickConnect is their remote access service that basically skips the drama of port forwarding by talking to their own upstream service and giving you a domain to connect to. This was pretty simple stuff to setup and great for a less savvy user, but probably not enough for an advanced user wanting to run and host multiple services.
Interestingly enough I run a DuckDNS domain and LetsEncrypt alongside it and the moment the QuickConnect system went live on my network it overrode that completely and the Synology interface just took over all domain calls internally and externally. I couldn't figure it out and even disabling the service didn't have much effect.
The interface is very detailed with loads and loads of nerdy options but this may be a little too much for normal people or not so tech-savvy users. It would have been a nice feature to see an option presented at first connection to choose a Lite vs Hardcore interface.
There's a great Windows Explorer-like app pre-installed called File Station that allows for managing folders and files and connections which is really a nice addition compared to many other options I've seen out there.
I was particularly surprised with the ability to mount both NFS and Samba shares from external sources which expand it's limitations in 2-drives only storage somewhat. Although I didn't test it I'm sure one could use the multiple USB ports to add additional drives in this way as well.
Even more interesting is that you could make the DS218j (and presumably any other DS product) your Router by letting it dial your PPPoE connection as well as manage a DHCP server and even as Traffic Control options to manage bandwidth.
That goes even further in that you can make it a wireless access point as well by connecting up a USB wireless card.
Loads of security and firewalling options as well and something I would definitely take a deeper look at potentially using it as a Gateway device in the future.
There are even options to join it to a domain or LDAP server and using SSO.
The only thing I've found to be missing actually are VPN server/client options, but I guess they kind of take care of the former with their QuickConnect service.
Sadly this is not the version that supports 4K Transcoding which is a feature I was keenly looking forward to having taken the plunge with a 4K TV and lots of 4K media, but still having some older 1080p devices in the house.
There are plenty of Cloud Service options available as well so you could happily sync the most popular ones to your local internal network cloud and not rely so heavily on an active internet connection or local device storage.
Being a 2-drive only unit this is more of a backup solution or storage for data you are ready to lose. If you are looking for redundancy and larger storage arrays then I would advise seeking out the 4-bay Synology options available where RAID5 is an option.
The DS218 only mirrors two drives which means your storage volumes are cut in half and total storage is somewhat limited by the size of the two drives. Expansion isn't directly possible and I'm pretty sure RAID5 wouldn't be configurable over USB externals.
I was hopeful of seeing some Docker support but I suspect that is specifically removed due to lower processing and memory combination here. There are however quite a lot of apps (called packages) available from many vendors.
My favourite being Plex Media Server which I quickly tested and worked well enough as long as you kept it strictly to 1080p or less and didn't require much in the way of transcoding.
Conclusion
Overall I think this is a great device for a reasonably light and maybe not so IT-oriented user who just wants a place to backup their files and make them remotely available at the same time.
I personally wouldn't use it for redundant storage, purely due to the size limitations of only having a mirror of two drives, but a truly surprising suite of networking tools provided might see me use it for all the other things it didn't even market itself for.
Likes
- Very quiet.
- Small form factor
- Low power
- Sexy design
- In-depth interface with loads of options and capabilities.
- Cloud Services Integration
- Variety of Apps
- Remote File Shares
- Easy Remote Access
- Very surprising networking capability.
Dislikes
- A bit plastic.
- No 4K Transcoding.
- The interface might be a bit heavy for regular consumers.
- Only 2-drives supported.
- Backup more than redundant storage.