Synology RackStation RS2818RP+
Performance is somewhat uneven, but this feature-rich NAS appliance offers a huge capacity at a great price
“The Atom CPU is of the 64-bit variety, so the full range of apps and features is available – with backup tools in particular abundance”
SCORE PRICE Diskless, £2,308 exc VAT from span.com
The RS2818RP+is the first 3U rack NAS appliance in Synology’s “Plus” series, offering costconscious SMEs a more affordable alternative to the meaty RS4017xs+. With 16 hot-swap SATA drive bays, it has the same enormous storage capacity as its big brother – but a few features have been trimmed to keep the cost down. For one, the dual embedded 10GBase-T ports have been ditched – but you can install your own 10GbE card in the RS2818RP+’s single PCI-Express expansion slot. We used an Emulex dual-port 10GBase-T card with no difficulties at all.
You also get only one Infiniband disk shelf expansion port, and in place of the eight-core Xeon processor found in the RS4017xs+, there’s a lightweight quad-core Atom C3538. This is certainly less of a powerhouse, but it’s more than ample for ordinary file-sharing duties. Finally, the appliance comes with a modest 4GB of RAM, but you can expand this up to 64GB. None of these sacrifices ought to be deal-breakers for a small business – especially when they make the RS2818RP+ nearly £2,000 cheaper than its sibling.
For testing, we installed a quartet of 10TB Seagate IronWolf SATA NAS drives; the carriers aren’t tool-free, but fitting the disks is quick and easy. Then, we dropped into Synology’s discovery web portal to initialise the drives. RAID5 and 6 are fully supported, as is Synology’s own Hybrid RAID system; this makes more efficient use of differently sized disks, and lets you choose between single and dual-drive redundancy.
With that done, the latest DSM 6.1 software was installed. The Atom CPU is of the 64-bit variety, so the full range of apps and features is available – with data backup tools in particular abundance. The Cloud Station Server app, for example, works with the Windows client to provide one-way synchronisation. If it’s two-way syncing you need, the Cloud Station Drive agent has you covered. And then there’s the Active Backup for Servers app, which secures data on Windows and Linux network shares.
On top of that, Synology also offers free Active Backup apps for G Suite and Office 365, while the Cloud Station Server app provides excellent backup and file sharing services. Even better, BTRFS volumes support both manual and scheduled NAS and IP SAN snapshots.
If there’s a catch, it’s that network performance proved quite variable. With our IronWolf drives configured as one big 27.3TB RAID5 array, we used Iometer to test read and write speeds between the appliance and a Dell PowerEdge R540 running Windows Server 2016 on dual Xeon Gold 6130 CPUs. Read rates were excellent, at 9.2Gbits/sec – but write speeds averaged just 4.2Gbits/sec.
A similar gap was evident in our real-world file-copy tests, although here the discrepancy was smaller: our 25GB test file was read from the appliance at 4.2Gbits/sec, but written back at 3.3Gbits/sec.
Still, backup performance was respectable, and we were able to write a 22.4GB folder of 10,500 small files to the appliance at an average of 2.2Gbits/sec. Encryption performance isn’t bad either: our 25GB file was written to an encrypted folder at 1.4Gbits/sec. That’s far short of the 2.7Gbits/sec acheived by Qnap’s Ryzen-powered TS-1277 desktop appliance ( see issue 283, p101), but it’s fast enough for everyday office use.
There’s more good stuff on the way too: Synology’s forthcoming DSM 6.2 software will allow the appliance to host VMs running your choice of OS, and features a vSwitch feature to isolate VM traffic on selected network interfaces. There’s also a new iSCSI Manager app in the works, which will add more IP SAN features, including simplified target management and faster snapshot and recovery processes. The Storage Manager app is in for a welcome makeover too, replacing the confusing Disk Groups and RAID Groups with Storage Pools.
It’s certainly not the fastest NAS we’ve seen, but the RS2818RP+ is an impressive package for the price. It offers a very high capacity – backed up by dual-redundant PSUs – and a superb selection of backup and cloud features.
SPECIFICATIONS 3U rackmount chassis 2.1GHz Intel Atom C3538 processor 4GB DDR4 (max 64GB) 16 x LFF/SFF hot-swap SATA drive bays supports RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 6, SHR, hot-spare, JBOD 4 x Gigabit Ethernet 2 x USB 3 expansion port PCI-Express slot 2 x 500W hotplug PSUs 3yr hardware warranty