Review on 💾 Synology 8 Bay DiskStation DS1821+ (Diskless) | 8-Bay NAS Device with 4GB DDR4 RAM by Jere Mosley

If you can afford the upfront cost, buy Synology. Comfort and ease of use are fully consistent with the price. You could build a more powerful NAS yourself for less money, but it would use more power, take up more space, and (most importantly) require more time/effort to manage. My previous setup was a Mac mini with a USB stick attached to it. This worked fine for about 9 years for the most part and I wanted to update the setup and thought it might be worth taking a look at some relevant NAS options. I've always been put off by the relatively high prices of NAS devices, especially Synology, but after reading about all the built-in features, I took the plunge and tried the Synology DS1621+. I'm glad I did! This device has a fantastic range of features, most of which I don't really need, but the ones I use work very well and (just as importantly) were extremely easy to set up. Here are some thoughts on things I've been using so far: Synology Hybrid Raid (SHR): I'm using the SHR-2 for dual redundancy and it was easy to set up. I like that I can easily add another plate later and expand the pool. It also supports checksum verification and repairing with "Data Cleansing" if you're using the default BTRFS filesystem, which is why I've set it to run monthly to avoid bit rot. I don't have enough experience with it yet to say how it works in practice, but in principle it's great. Shared Folders: This is the bread and butter of NAS and is very easy to set up and configure with Synology DSM. . It works much better than shared drives on my old Mac mini because it handles permissions correctly and everything "just works". Time Machine Backup: It's basically a shared folder extension, with additional configuration required to view the folder. as a backup destination for your own network time machine. Worked with no issues setting up backups for multiple Mac containers. Docker: I migrated all my Docker containers that previously worked in Docker Desktop on a Mac mini to Synology and they work much better than on a Mac. They're faster and easier to manage thanks to a decent built-in UI. I would have preferred native support for Docker Compose, hopefully that will come in the future, but for my use case, setting it up via the UI was fine. Application Portal/Reverse Proxy: I love this feature, it makes sending service requests super easy. I can easily set up nginx manually or automatically, but for home use I prefer the simple interface that Synology offers. You can assign certificates to routes and everything works fine with my custom domain. Certificates: I have high hopes for native support for Let's Encrypt, but unfortunately it requires the server to be connected to the internet (no thanks). Hopefully in the future they will support a DNS query option, but for now an easy way to solve this is to use the open source acme.sh file, which supports many DNS providers and has built-in hooks for certificate enrollment with Synology's user interface. I have acme.sh working with Synology Task Scheduler and it works great. VPN Server: Supports L2TP/IPSec so you can use the built-in VPN for iPhone/Mac, no third-party apps are required on your devices. It's the only one I've put online and in my testing it worked right away with the minimum configuration required. Other thoughts: - Synology Chat: Weak Fake honestly works better than I expected! I disabled this because I don't fully trust the security of this app for your internet access. - Hyper Backup: I haven't fully set this up yet, but it seems to support a good range of services - File Station: a really good web-based file browser that you can access from the admin UI or as a standalone web interface. There are so many other features that I haven't even looked into, such as: B. the built-in Plex support, but I can say that this NAS has exceeded my expectations and I expect to continue to find new useful features as I dig and tweak. On the hardware side, I've made a few upgrades: - 32GB RAM: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0899KV2L5/ - Synology 10 Gbps Ethernet Adapter: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/ product/B07G9N9KJT/ I am using two Seagate IronWolf 8TB drives and two WD Red Plus 8TB drives and they both work fine. Seagate drives have additional diagnostic information thanks to a special built-in integration with IronWolf drives, which is very convenient. Unfortunately the WD Red Plus drives say they are unverified because Synology didn't add them to the official list of verified drives for the DS1621+, but I'm pretty sure that was an oversight because the WD Red Plus Drives are listed as officially verified for almost everything else Synology NAS. In practice there is no difference. Despite the high overall costs, I am completely satisfied with my purchase and expect a long service life.