Synology 6 Bay NAS DiskStation - DS1618+ (Diskless)

I purchased this NAS to replace my very old Drobo Mini. A lot of research went into my decision to go with a Synology device and 3 weeks in I'm confident I had the right decision. This NAS ticks all the boxes:- High storage capacity with ability to expand the storage pool without taking the array down.- The disk management software is extremely easy to learn yet powerful- I/O performance is great and can be even better with the 10gbe expansion card. I consistently get around 114 MB/s transfer speeds over gigabit ethernet which I know isnt the fastest speeds possible but it is sufficient for me.- Running a single 1080p Plex stream barely ticks the cpu/ram which leads me to believe this NAS could easily run quite a few streams at one time.Side note: I used Carbonite to keep my Drobo backed up to cloud however the only plan Carbonite has that supports NAS is their business plan which is double the price of the home plan and only supports a storage size of 250gb (vs unlimited). After a lot of frustrating research I went with Backblaze B2 to back the synology up to cloud and while its not finished, it has been working fine. In addition, B2 runs directly on the NAS so it doesnt need to be linked to a host to run.

I bought this to replace a 10-year-old super loud, power-hungry server in my basement. Absolutely brilliant product, works as advertised and I'm very happy. Shucked some cheap WD 10TB EasyStore drives for storage. I also replaced the fans with quieter Noctua units. I have 3 RAID 1 arrays using BTRFS: 2x SSDs for the Synology OS & VMs, 2x WD 10TB for media, and 2x WD 4TB for surveillance cold storage. Be warned; the Atom CPU in this model is not a great choice for running any serious Virtual Machines. I am running 2 Windows Server VMs: a domain controller and a Ubiquiti Controller. They're quite sluggish, but get the job done. I installed 32GB ECC Corsair RAM for 3 reasons: 1) dual-channel RAM runs faster 2) spare RAM for VMs 3) BTRFS requires ECC RAM to provide full data protection. BTRFS is about as close as you can get to 100% data protection right now but only if you use ECC RAM, and this is the cheapest Synology NAS with support for ECC. I tried Surveillance Station and found it to be under-powered and unreliable. The Atom CPU just isn't up to the task. However, as a NAS and very basic VM host it works wonderfully. I back up weekly to a WD 10TB EasyStore, and swap it out once a month with an identical off-site unit. Absolutely first class for keeping your data safe. Great job Synology!

After two QNAP NAS's I decided to try Synology, and I was not disappointed. It is not as glitzy as QNAP, but it can be argued that when it comes to functionality, QNAP has a lot more work to do to catch up. Everything that I had read about Synology turned out to be true, and to sum it all up, It Just Works. Its features are not necessarily the latest and greatest technology that sometimes works, and there is no real use case for them yet.Instead, they are well thought out, well designed, and well-executed. It can servers a windows domain controller, as a VPN server, Media server, file server, you can carve LUNs and connect to machines that are low on disk space, transfer files back and forth in high speed (thanks to its team able four network ports), etc. The wealth of its application portfolio is impressive. The network back up sever not only works flawlessly but with its de-duping technology has shrunk my backups from 1.4 TBs every night to 200 GBs by efficiently removing repeated data between back up volumes of any machine. I could be sitting here and write for a long while about Synology NAS features. Instead, I think you are best served to investigate further for yourself.

very good for personal and small business office.I bought DS1618+ and Synology M.2 Adapter Card (M2D18) , 2 of Crucial 16GB DDR4 SDRAM Memory Module - 16 GB - DDR4-2666/PC4-21300 DDR4 SDRAM - CL19-1.20 V - ECC - Unbuffered - 260-pin - SoDIMM, 6 of HGST Ultrastar 6TB SATA 6Gb/s 7.2K RPM 128MB Cache 3.5-Inch HDD | 512e | Enterprise Hard Drive, 2 of Samsung 970 EVO SSD 500GB - M.2 NVMe.Quiet than I thought, I think noise is related to hard drive and my old 416play make loud noise when write the files.I don't feel any differences speed between with cache and without cache while transferring files.It took 3 hours to migrate 700GB with gigabit wired network from server to NAS.Very good for backup office 365 email and files with batch process and hit almost max of cpu resources.I set raid 6 but if you want to have better write performance and low noise then I recommend set raid 10 with bigger drives and low rpm.I'm using this for 10 people office environment and very good and enough capacity.

A small caveat, i'm barely few days into using this NAS.Absolute gem of a device. Its basically a unix (linux) server complete with management software and a bunch of disks. Its going to become a centerpiece of my home infrastructure.My only regret is not getting the 8 disk version. This device is much smaller than what it appears on photographs. Flexibility of having two additional slots I'm sure would come in handy in the future. Other than that, i'm supremely satisfied with this investment.On a separate note, i'm quite happy with WD RED hard drives, they seem to work (again, this is a very short term experience, so take it fwiw) and they're very quiet.