Review on Diskless Synology 💾 DS218j 2-Bay NAS DiskStation by Jagvir Singhtakhar ᠌

Name: Diskless Synology 💾 DS218j 2-Bay NAS DiskStation
Item: Diskless Synology 💾 DS218j 2-Bay NAS DiskStation
Rating: 5

October 29, 2022

Quality is top notch, happy with everything.

I met Synology at work, this brand has proven itself well as reliable and practical devices. These devices have been working for years 24/7/365, without failures, without problems - that's why it was decided to buy a Synology device for home.
My wife is a marketing designer, and carrying all the developments on an external usb drive was simply not safe, and not practical. Often she forgot this disk at home or in the office at work, which reduced the productivity of work, and gave a slight stress to the female body.
In addition, the number of family photos on different devices began to exceed the planned size on phones and flash drives, which also influenced the acquisition of Synology NAS.
In general, everyone is happy, photos are synchronized with NAS, files are available from anywhere in the world. Weekly reports, inform the mail about the status of the disks.

Pros

1) Adequate design. Have you seen the design of QNAP at all? Yes, this is a complete freak compared to the Synology DS218 with its matte black case, an order of magnitude more beautiful. Network storage in matte color, looks very good in any design or place. 2) In the DSM 7 version, the web interface was fixed, the interface is intuitive, a nice bonus is the addition of widgets with statistics. 2022 interface is also present. 3) Adequate support. When setting up a backup of photos from devices, I turned to support for help. Support responded quickly, in 2022, clearly. 4) Free DAmazon, and built-in OpenVPN. Special thanks for these two features that help you connect to the NAS safely and quickly. 5) A large number of services, namely: smb, afp, nfs, ftp (ftps), rsync, tftp, webdav, dlna. 6) Personal cloud from office. This is the best that a Taiwanese company could come up with. A complete analogue of Google Drive or disk. At any time, you can connect via the web interface to your personal cloud - nas, and edit or print the file, without purchasing a license for MS Office. 7) Synology Disk Station DS218 has 2Gb of RAM, and a relatively weak processor, which can be seen when indexing files and photos, movies, but you just have to wait and it's a pleasure to work. On younger devices, it is generally impossible to work in the web interface when using the storage to the maximum. Which once again proves that the DS218 is good in terms of price = quality. 8) Ability to connect additional external devices: ip-cameras, printers, hdd/sdd. 9) Security - having a built-in antivirus, a safe settings test and support from developers and technical support, helps keep your data safe. 10) File versioning.

Cons

1) This is the low performance of this model, on the official website it is indicated as more than 112 mb / s when reading and 112 mb / s when writing. Even with a gigabit local network, with large files, you feel a slight slowdown (when working with psd, you don’t feel it). 2) Light clicks when exiting sleep mode (most likely it's the HDD). 3) Slow applications for mobile devices, it's not clear why they can't fix the upload-download speed in mobile applications, it seems they are not very important for them. 4) Lack of on-demand file synchronization on MAC (similar to working with OneDrive Windows 10). Due to the fact that a constant connection to the device, like smb, loads the network, then on a laptop outside the home, a personal cloud Synology Drive is used. Client for MAC OS, does not support downloading files on demand, but synchronizes the entire folder. 5) with DSM 7 disabled full compatibility of MS Office and Synology Office, you have to convert to a special synology format. 6) No option to disable quickconnect. To access for some users. Which is not safe when using this functionality.