Synology RackStation DS1618+
A powerful, well-priced desktop NAS with a tonne of business features and a welcome 10-Gigabit option
SCORE PRICE Diskless, £634 exc VAT from transparent-uk.com
Synology launched its first six-bay NAS, the DS3018xs, last year; now it’s following up with the DS1618+, a serious-looking appliance aimed at small businesses. It features a current-generation Atom C3538 CPU and a respectable 4GB of DDR4 RAM, expandable to a huge 32GB, making it one of Synology’s most powerful desktop NAS units.
At the back of the chassis you’ll find four Gigabit Ethernet ports, three USB 3 connectors and dual eSATA ports – each supporting one of Synology’s five-bay DX517 expansion units, for a maximum of 16 drives. There’s space for a single PCI-Express card too, so you can add a 10GbE adapter, or Synology’s M2D17 dual M.2 SSD high-speed cache card. SODIMM slots are conveniently tucked behind a removable hatch on the underside.
For testing, we slipped four 10TB Seagate IronWolf hard disks into the appliance’s tool-free drive carriers. Synology’s software picked them up right away, and formatted them as one big 27.3TB SHR-1 (Synology Hybrid RAID) array. Traditionalists can choose RAID5 or 6 arrays, but SHR lets you expand your array just by adding more disks, and you can even convert an SHR-1 array on the fly to an SHR-2 dual-drive redundant array.
With your volume created, it’s time to dive into Synology’s DSM software. The latest version (6.2) has recently emerged from beta testing, and it’s brimming with backup features. For starters, Btrfs volumes support on-demand and scheduled snapshots, which can be replicated to remote Synology appliances. The Hyper Backup app, meanwhile, manages all your local, remote and cloud backups, with helpful wizards to walk you through a huge range of backup tasks.
Then there’s the Cloud Sync app, which supports a whopping 22 public providers – and in the Cloud Station Server app you can create a private cloud to host your own backups. We also liked the Active Backup for Servers app, which uses SMB and rsync for agentless backups from Windows and Linux servers.
If you beef up the memory, the DS1618+ even makes a perfectly good virtualisation host. We had Windows Server 2016 up and running inside Synology’s Virtual Machine Manager app inside 20 minutes, with regular snapshots in case of disaster.
“With its up-to-date CPU and big memory capacity, the DS1618+ is a great choice for storage duties – and for several other roles besides”
And if this month’s guide to IP cameras has whetted your appetite, Synology’s Surveillance Station app is worth a look. Two camera licences are included in the price; we had no problem connecting both the Axis M3015-LVE and Samsung PNF-9010R at once. We set recording schedules, enabled motion detection and used the e-Map to pinpoint their location.
If the DS1618+ has a weakness, it’s slightly inconsistent performance. Using an Emulex 10GBase-T adapter (which worked straight out of the box) we obtained fast Iometer sequential read speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec, but much lower 4.3Gbits/sec write rates. Adding a second 10GbE connection and running the test over both at once gave us cumulative read and write rates of 11.9Gbits/sec and 5.1Gbits/sec. It was a similar story in our real-world tests: our 25GB test file was read from the appliance at 4.8Gbits/sec, but written back more slowly, at 3.4Gbits/sec. Still, that’s fast enough for any small business. And general backup performance was better, with our 10,500 small files written at a respectable 2.3Gbits/sec.
With its up-to-date CPU and big memory capacity, the DS1618+ is a great choice for storage duties – and for several other roles besides. Yes, 10GbE performance is uneven, but it’s not a big problem, and at just £634 for a diskless unit it’s very hard to complain.
SPECIFICATIONS Desktop chassis 2.1GHz Intel Atom C3538 CPU 4GB DDR4 (max 32GB) 6 x LFF/SFF hot-swap SATA drive bays supports RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 6, SHR-1/2, hot-spare, JBOD 4 x Gigabit Ethernet 3 x USB 3 2 x eSATA PCI-Express slot 3yr hardware warranty