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NAS and storage · Synology NAS

Synology NAS DS918+

8owners with an opinion
67%of verdicts positive
2/1positive/negative since 2024
8 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability; criticized for support and value.

What people wrote

Likes itOwned 8 yearsStill going
Anyone know of something equivalent to the HL-8 from 45homelab but more affordable? The price ($700) is obscene for a barebones chassis that is just a backplane w/o cpu/mobo/ram/psu: https://store.45homelab.com/configure/hl8 The Unifi UNAS Pro looks pretty cool (and my entire rack is Unifi) but I want more control over the OS and would prefer to run TrueNAS: https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/unas-pro I am shopping to replace a DS918+ that has been in service for almost 8 years. Honestly it's been rock solid without a single hiccup - even upgraded the entire pool disk-by-disk a few years back without problems. But I was already losing interest in Synology's OS and after their recent shift to locking down drive options that is the nail in the coffin so I wanna build my own.
Likes itOwned 1 year
I've had my Synology DS918+ for about a year, and overall I've been happy with it except for one huge mess with encrypted folders completely wrecking my Dropbox for a few weeks. Here's what happened: I wanted to have a backup of my Dropbox on my NAS, so I used Synology's CloudSync service to back up to an encrypted folder. Unfortunately Synology's encryption actually encrypts each file individually, which Dropbox happily syncs to all of the computers that use that Dropbox, making all of those files unusable! In the end, I had to write a script that detected which files were encrypted (files start with `__CLOUDSYNC_ENC__`), then use a WINDOWS ONLY decryption utility provided by Synology to decrypt and finally get back to a clean state. Then I wrote another script to move the decrypted files back into the proper path in Dropbox while correcting the newly decrypted files with the original metadata (creation date) from the encrypted bad files. What a pain!! I'm still not sure of a good way to achieve my original goal of backing up Dropbox while still protecting my data with encryption. Let me know if anyone has a solution!
Doesn’t like it
My Synology DS918+ ran for years without an issue. Then suddenly I woke up and I had the blinking blue light of death, it starts but won't boot. It could be anything from the BIOS battery going dead to parts not being soldered properly. The only way I could get data off their proprietary SHR system (which is great, except when the HW breaks) would've been to buy a new Synology system, put the drives there and pray it works out of the box. At that point I decided to move out of a NAS appliance and build one myself, based on Unraid. Now I've got the same 1 drive redundancy BUT every file exists on exactly one drive, that drive has a bog-standard XFS filesystem. So if the HW breaks I can just take the drive(s) out and use them in a cheap USB dock. The Synology's issue turned out to be a bad PSU - the light turned on but for some reason it didn't provide enough power for the system to POST. I grabbed a 3rd party one off Amazon and now it's running offsite backups for the Unraid system :)
Neutral
I have the DS918+ I would not make the same choices today: I got a somewhat high end one and upgraded it to whopping 32GB of RAM, thinking I'd use it for running lightweight containers or VMs, and maybe a media server. But once I put all my data on it... including 20 years of family photos and tax prep documents and work stuff and everything else... I changed my mind and am using it only and solely as an internal storage unit. Basically, as mentioned, committed to the "NAS" as opposed to "Fun Project" path :-). So I could've saved myself some money by getting a simpler unit and not upgrading it. (the DS918+ also can hook up to a cage [DX517], but I ended up not needing that either, yet). I have it with 4 drives and RAID 10 currently. I've used RAID 5 in the past but decided against it for this usage - again, went for simplicity.
Doesn’t like it
The "major consumption" from a 4 bay nas is usually from the drives. I used WD official documentation for my consumption figures ( https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library... ), which state 5.5W idle, 8.8W access. Being WD Red (Plus) drives, they don't support hibernation (not supported in firmware), so they're spinning 24/7, though supposedly using only 5.5W doing it. So in theory the NAS should be able to go as low as 20W, but in reality it rarely does, at least not when running the drives in raid. Because it uses the same drives as its root/boot partition, anything that logs will write to disks, essentially keeping them active most of the time. Over a weeks usage, my DS918+ rarely dipped below 40W, and the average consumption was 44.8W over that week. There could be an easy "fix" for it, as the 918/920 models have 2 NVME bays, so in theory if Synology would allow it, those could be used for boot/root, allowing the spinning rust some rest every now and then. Instead i've turned it off, and replaced with a small ARM device with an SSD. I'm also experimenting with a NUC7CJYH with a large Seagate Barracuda drive and a USB stick for root/boot, and that averages a power consumption of about 5W over a week being used for daily backups. I tried with a RPi 4 with a bus powered USB drive, and that ended up at 4W, so if power consumption is "almost equal", the NUC has a lot more power.
Neutral
The measurements (45W) was the average power consumption at the wall by my DS918+ equipped with 4 x 8TB WD Red drives. WD Red drives do not support spin down, so at most they're idle. Synology does publish power consumption for each model, i.e. for the DS920+ ( https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS920+#specs ) model they state : - 32.17W access - 9.69W HD Hibernation But, they also specify that the drives used for their calculation is Power consumption is measured when it is fully loaded with Western Digital 1TB WD10EFRX hard drive(s). And looking up power consumption of that particular model we get - read/write 3.7W - idle 3.1W - standby 0.6W so for the "access" vaule we can subtract 4x3.7W (14.8) and see that the device itself uses 17.37W. Then lookup the power consumption of your drives, i.e. WD80EFAX ( https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library... ), and find - read/write 8.8W - idle 5.5W - standby 0.8W So you add the 4x8.8W (35.2W) to the 17.37W and arrive at 52.57W for "access".
Neutral
The load for the Synology model itself varies, but is usually around 10W - 20W. Add to that the load provided by the hard drives themselves, which is usually around 4W - 9W per drive. Low estimate is 10+4x4 = 26W High estimate is 20 + 4x9 = 56W. Wall measurements from my own DS918+ model with 4x8TB WD Red are 40W (idle) - 48W (full load on drives) - 52W (CPU load and some drive load).
Likes it
In terms of live, installed, ready to go: 2. A main daily driver (Ubuntu 20) and my old desktop machine running Proxmox so I can spin up any test network I want/need for dev work. 4 if you're including laptops (HP Elitebook w/ Ubuntu 20, Macbook air) but they're mostly gathering dust as I've not commuted anywhere in a few years Also got an old Android tablet which is mostly dedicated to Todoist (mounted above my monitor on an arm) and an iPad for background entertainment/distraction while working. They dual-function as test devices as needed for webdev :) I used to have the could-probably-get-it-working guts of 4 or 5 laptops and an older desktop following me around but I guess they finally got sold off for parts during my last move I'd probably have more but I'm renting a relatively small single room compared to my last place. The two desktops alone have meant I've not needed the heating on whenever they're both going. E: Oh aye there's also a 9-disk NAS knocking about somewhere too (Synology DS918 plus an expander bay). I use that more than my desktop I guess technically. Everything mounts off it somehow or other so I'm counting it :) Tell you what, Tailscale is the one app that's got me back into home network nerdery. I love hosting internal things on my Proxmox server or NAS that just.. work, even when I'm not at home. No matter where I am in the world, I can mount nas.coio.uk and, aside from a bit of lag in some places, it works just as well as it would locally connected…