Synology DS918+

marshac

American Hero
Joined
Mar 25, 2003
Messages
2,551
This thing is bomb. I’ve got it upgraded to 16GB of RAM with two M.2 drives for I/O cache. It’s running a Windows 2016 virtual machine and all the usual Synology goodies. Really amazing piece of hardware, and if you’re looking for a new NAS, it’s well worth a look.
 
Nice, I have the last gen 1515+ with upgraded memory but it does not have the M.2 NVMe support. It's my third Synology and they've all been flawless! I guess if/when I upgrade it, I'll get to see how much difference the enhanced I/O caching makes...but that'll likely be a while.
 
I've heard great things about it too. As a matter of fact, if I were to start all over again in building my home lab, the first thing I would do is to get exactly that NAS. And then to build a backup and disaster recovery solution around it. And then let everything else take over from there (virt host, etc).
 
I have the older 1812+ and really love it for a huge storage / backup solution with (2) drive fault tolerance... BUT I seriously don't use it for anything else.

I don't stream anything.. I don't have movies or music.. I just use it for all the photos and videos I need to backup (I am a photographer for work).

Am I missing anything that would be awesome to have ? I would love to figure out how to get to my videos and photos remotely, but I never really figured out how to set that up.

Ryan G
 
I'm actually looking into a setting up a secondary home NAS, and I wonder if this model might be hit the sweet spot in just the right way. I'll be keeping a very close eye on this model.

I've heard it's great for running Docker and also for hosting services, as well as functioning as a NAS, i.e., its primary function. Does anybody have experience with this? For example, I'd love to set up Apache, a self-hosted photo application, and simply serve up my photo albums directly from this machine. Is it suitable for this? Am I extending it too for, or should I keep it strictly or NAS functionality?
 
I'm actually looking into a setting up a secondary home NAS, and I wonder if this model might be hit the sweet spot in just the right way. I'll be keeping a very close eye on this model.

I've heard it's great for running Docker and also for hosting services, as well as functioning as a NAS, i.e., its primary function. Does anybody have experience with this? For example, I'd love to set up Apache, a self-hosted photo application, and simply serve up my photo albums directly from this machine. Is it suitable for this? Am I extending it too for, or should I keep it strictly or NAS functionality?

I have a Windows Server VM running on the 918+ with 16GB RAM (it works fine- I'm using HX316LS9IBK2), 8GB of that as well as two of the four cores allocated to the VM. I've got IIS, Lucee and MSSQL running on it. Speed is reasonable for what I'm doing- obviously not suitable for a website with any serious volume of visitors. Plex runs within the native OS and supports hardware transcoding acceleration. Overall for $549 it's a tremendous piece of hardware, and for a few hundred more you can really deck it out with more RAM and two NVMe modules. It also supports the external drive bay, so adding more storage won't require you to ditch your current drives.
 
Overall for $549 it's a tremendous piece of hardware, and for a few hundred more you can really deck it out with more RAM and two NVMe modules. It also supports the external drive bay, so adding more storage won't require you to ditch your current drives.

Do you mean that _this_ particular model supports increased RAM and NVMe? Sounds excellent. I've got a different FreeNAS box as my primary NAS, but I'm thinking of picking up one of these too. Probably it's overkill to use solely as a backup of the primary NAS, but it seems like something I really want to learn more about and host some services on. If I had my time again I'd choose this instead of building my own.
 
Do you mean that _this_ particular model supports increased RAM and NVMe? Sounds excellent. I've got a different FreeNAS box as my primary NAS, but I'm thinking of picking up one of these too. Probably it's overkill to use solely as a backup of the primary NAS, but it seems like something I really want to learn more about and host some services on. If I had my time again I'd choose this instead of building my own.

Yes- 918+ actually has two memory slots and despite the specs, can use 16GB of RAM. I listed the specific memory I use which is similar to what others had reported working. It has worked flawlessly for me. Others have reported the same in various symbology discussion forums. There are also two NVMe slots easily accessible on the bottom of the NAS- I have two 128GB drives loaded up. Overall for the price it really is great hardware.
 
I have been very happy with my ds3612xs the past six years, the software is great but the hardware is horrendously overpriced. I had already upgraded the RAM to max 32GB (back when that was cheap) and I have an Intel 10GbE NIC in there for 600MB/s transfer speeds.

I just bought the best Xeon that will work in the mobo (e3-1290) which will replace the i3-2100, doubling cores/threads and increasing clocks 17% base, 30% boosted, but TDP going up about 45% and since it’s passively cooled, I bought an AIO loop for it. Installing this morning, I’m probably more excited about this than I should be
 
I was thinking of picking this up. What drives do you guys recommend to go with it? My budget would be around 1100-1200 for everything.
 
I have been very happy with my ds3612xs the past six years, the software is great but the hardware is horrendously overpriced. I had already upgraded the RAM to max 32GB (back when that was cheap) and I have an Intel 10GbE NIC in there for 600MB/s transfer speeds.

I just bought the best Xeon that will work in the mobo (e3-1290) which will replace the i3-2100, doubling cores/threads and increasing clocks 17% base, 30% boosted, but TDP going up about 45% and since it’s passively cooled, I bought an AIO loop for it. Installing this morning, I’m probably more excited about this than I should be

New CPU is in and the performance difference is substantial. Radiator sticks 1" out of the side :(

YEgGmv7.png
 
So how easy/suitable would something like this be to store all my plex movies on?

I'd probably still use my desktop for the streaming/encoding/etc.

Would this make sense?
 
Why use your desktop? The whole reason is to run everything together.. do you need to do alot of transcoding or have several 1080p streams going at once? If not combine the rolls.
 
Yeah- the whole point of having what amounts to a fairly capable computer inside of a NAS is so that you don't need a separate computer for transcoding, etc. Use the NAS for everything- it works well for Plex.
 
So just toying with this idea, it looks like I can spend $400 by throwing a G4400 in a h110 mobo, in a $30 case with 4 hdd slots, a cheapo SSD for the OS, and my blu-ray drive for backing up, share various folders with my network and it should perform the same function, right?

Edit:
Like this
https://pcpartpicker.com/user/craigdt/saved/prbD8d
 
So just toying with this idea, it looks like I can spend $400 by throwing a G4400 in a h110 mobo, in a $30 case with 4 hdd slots, a cheapo SSD for the OS, and my blu-ray drive for backing up, share various folders with my network and it should perform the same function, right? Yes you can but then need to run a docker or freenas solution plus other little bits. Alot ppl just want there nas to work. I personally still rock an older hp micro server as my nas

Edit:
Like this
https://pcpartpicker.com/user/craigdt/saved/prbD8d
 

Well, to test this theory, I set up a shared folder on my miner rig, and created a mapped drive to that folder on my main desktop.

Plex found that "mapped drive" folder easily.

I guess I don't know what I need FreeNas for something simple like moving files around from one machine to another.
 
Well, to test this theory, I set up a shared folder on my miner rig, and created a mapped drive to that folder on my main desktop.

Plex found that "mapped drive" folder easily.

I guess I don't know what I need FreeNas for something simple like moving files around from one machine to another.
snice your miner rig stays on 24/7 and you just want a place to serve up plex that would be an okay choice
 
I've got the 916 and I love it.

Being able to run the few bits I have on docker without a server running and plex do a 4k transcode is immense.
 
If you want to play around with the synology software FOR EVALUATION PURPOSES ONLY, there are ways of running it on generic hardware. There are even vmware images that run quite well on esxi if you have a server already running. I actually run esxi off a small boot drive and run synology off of 4 drives in a small pc. Its a great way of testing versions before you upgrade your real synology hardware.
 
If you want to play around with the synology software FOR EVALUATION PURPOSES ONLY, there are ways of running it on generic hardware. There are even vmware images that run quite well on esxi if you have a server already running. I actually run esxi off a small boot drive and run synology off of 4 drives in a small pc. Its a great way of testing versions before you upgrade your real synology hardware.
I think this is broken with the latest releases of DSM.
 
Thanks for the heads up. As always, when testing this type of stuff, check around before installing or upgrading.

I am running DSM 6.0.2-8451 from August 2016 on my virtual synology and it still runs well.

My physical Synology DSs are running DSM 6.1.4-15217 Update 5
 
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