Synology DiskStation DS418j
THE ONCE-HUMBLE network attached storage (NAS) device is enjoying something of a revolution at the moment. Once the sole preserve of cluedup IT professionals, these days you’ll find these smart collections of hard drives in more and more homes. A lot of NAS manufacturers often try to bridge the gap between the needs of home and business with their latest models, but with the DiskStation DS418j, Synology is laser-focused on home users. This is a machine that is designed to stream your media to your TV just as much as it’s geared toward housing backups of all the machines on your network.
Just because it’s aimed at the home user, don’t think for a second that it’s lacking when it comes to specifications: The very fact it supports hardware encryption should be a good enough sign that this is a serious piece of gear. It’s as easy to set up as you want, too, with support for the automated Synology Hybrid RAID taking the hard work out of creating a RAID, although it supports all the standard arrays as well, including RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10, plus JBOD. At $299 for the diskless unit, it’s not too costly, either.
DRIVE BAYS Release the four thumbscrews on the back of the unit, flip the door down, and you have access to the four 3.5/2.5-inch drive bays. The DS418j supports up to 40TB of raw capacity, and you can set all of that up as a single volume, should you wish.
SOFTWARE Synology’s DiskStation Manager software is well respected for its versatility and stability, and it’s reason enough to want to grab this unit, whether you’re looking for centralized backup, media streaming, or a straight file server.
HARDWARE The DS418j uses a 64-bit, dual-core CPU from Realtek, running at 1.4GHz. It includes a hardware encryption engine, offering 112MB/s encrypted read and 87MB/s encrypted write performance. You also get 1GB of DDR4 to keep things running smoothly.