Synology DiskStation DS418 Play
While enjoying his extensive collection of 4K media, wonders if there’s more to life than streaming moving pictures?
While enjoying his collection of 4K media, Lindsay Handmer wonders if there’s more to life than streaming moving pictures?
The DS418play enables you to store huge amounts of video and photos, and then easily stream them all to any device on your network (or even remotely, if you have the bandwidth) without affecting your internet connection. It also provides an extra back-up option for those day-to-day memories, and has plenty of other functionality built in.
The DS418play is built around a now slightly dated Intel Celeron J3355 dual-core CPU, which can burst up to 2.5GHz. While the CPU does include Intel Graphics, there are no HDMI outputs. The NAS comes with 2GB of RAM, plus an empty slot that can handle an additional 4GB, for a total of 6GB.
Round the back, the 418play has dual Gigabit LAN ports, which support both link aggregation and failover. Link aggregation is especially handy in this case, because it means that with the right network setup, you can double the available bandwidth to the NAS. The 418play also has dual USB 3.0 ports (one in front and one back) that can be used to connect external storage devices, but no eSATA.
The four drive bays are tool-less and hot swappable, and can handle both 2.5- and 3.5-inch drives. They are also lockable with an included key, but this isn’t particularly secure and the bays can easily be jimmied open with a small flathead screwdriver. The NAS supports Btrfs and Ext4 file systems, and with support for up to four 14TB drives it can house a massive total of 56TB total storage.
Your number one fan
While it has decent ventilation, the DS418play’s dual 92mm fans can be noisy under load compared to a single larger fan. There is an option to run them in quiet mode, albeit at the expense of higher temperatures for your hard drives.
Getting Synology’s device up and running is dead simple. Slide in some drives, plug it in to power and your local network, and then point a browser at http://find.
synology.com. To make it completely foolproof, the DS418play includes a printed-out quickstart guide with instructions and diagrams.
The Synology NAS operating system is one of our favourites, and it’s well laid out and easy to use. It also provides a huge number of programs that can be downloaded and run on the NAS. While the web interface is an excellent way to manage the NAS, Synology also offers apps for smartphone or tablet control. Rather than putting all the functionality into a single app, Synology has built more than 10 separate ones that cover everything from file management to taking notes.
The key features of the DS418play all revolve around handling media. Most importantly, the device has the ability to transcode two 4K video streams at the same time. As 4K video content becomes more popular, we think this could certainly be a great option to have for future-proofing.
We tested the Synology DS418play equipped with 2GB of RAM, using four Seagate IronWolf Pro HDDs, and running Synology’s hybrid RAID. The DS418play performed well, and we experienced no problems streaming media to multiple devices at once. Transcoding worked flawlessly too, although it took a bit of fiddling to get Plex up and running. The DS418play happily maxed out our network with large file transfers, at 108.5 MB/s reading and 109.2 MB/s writing.
The Synology DS418play is an interesting NAS box, in that it’s highly geared towards lovers of 4K media, but omits related functionality such as an HDMI port or advanced expansion options like eSATA.