Review on 💾 Diskless Synology DS218+ 2-bay NAS DiskStation by Mark Hart

I've attached some photos, nothing special here, it's a 4-bay NAS (expandable to 9 drives). Light weight, plastic frame and hard drive case, but later, when it was loaded with drives, the weight savings were appreciated. Along with the drives, I also installed an M2 NVMe drive to set up the cache. Later, when tuning, you'll find that the Solo Cache SSD maximizes read speeds. To get the best performance for reading and writing tasks, you need 2 SSDs for caching. I need to do some testing and research here. I'm sure someone has figured it out already! I unpacked in 2 minutes, installed the drives in the slots which took about 5 minutes and booted up in 3 minutes (not fully configured but accessing the web utility is pretty quick for a first boot). You will be prompted to create an account and install DiskStation Manager. So, after ordering, download and prepare your PDFs and Synology DS Manager. The DS Manager install had a 10 minute countdown, but it took 5 minutes on my device. The admin website interface is a very nice desktop OS like navigation. You can install applications from Package Center, in "Shell" there is a control panel and file navigator to get you started. But first, go to Storage Manager to set up your drives. I got this more for media storage, so I went with Raid 5 to make the most of my new drives. The parity consistency check took about 12 hours. But I checked out about 2 hours later and had free disk space at the time, so I copied a few things to get started. Maybe it was like that from the start. In general it was easy to set up, I'm not a beginner but I'm not a super expert either. There were guides and menus along the way to help people who are new to NAS setup, and Synology boards are very active for research. I'll add an update later if I have something important in terms of performance or experience, but for now this does what it says and I'm happy with the device.