Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsBang for the buck
Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2020
If you're looking at a 8-bay Synology model, chances are it isn't your first network storage device and you're familiar with what these things can do. So I'll skip all that.
The DS1817 is a wonderful value proposition. What I love about this unit is it is built for providing storage on a network (duh...), but likewise stripped of a lot of the hardware extras you get in the Plus series, saving you on cost. Got mine through Amazon Warehouse for $550, and when it arrived, was in brand new condition. Runs great, and has handled everything I've thrown at it in spades. Currently running it with five 10TB HGST Ultrastar drives in SHR-1, so I have three extra bays for future expansion of I need it. Runs all my backups in the background, personal cloud, network drives for my little Intel NUC, etc. Kind of nice seeing 40TBs of available drive space in a little Intel NUC, but that's what network storage is all about. Just map network drives to your Synology, and you're off.
The Plus series usually have more powerful Intel Celeron chips, and together with hardware transcoding enabled, act as "all in one" media servers. This box probably can't do that very well if there is any transcoding to be done. That said, you can try to do that if you want, but keep in mind that most of us who buy J or Value series Synology boxes do our media conversion on other machines, and that's what I do too. I have a Lenovo Tiny running Plex Media Server, but I mounted my media shares from this Synology to it, taking the burden of any transcoding off this machine. So it does serve the media file, but it doesn't handle the conversion, the Lenovo server does that (it's running Ubuntu Server). Regardless this unit excels at that too.
Only downside is this is one of the last big Value series servers to remain on the ext4 file system, so there's no checksumming or bit rot protection that you get with the Plus or some of the other Value series units that offer the btrfs file system. That's okay for me though because I use enterprise class drives with robust bit error ratings, and my data is mostly huge media files, so if a bit flips, I doubt I would ever notice it. Critical documents I have backed up in encrypted cloud folders (the Synolgoy HyperBackup tool is astonishingly good at this). What I love about Synology's software is it's largely "set it and forget it."
Build quality is great, runs smoothly, and even upgrading the RAM was simple using an A-Tech 4GB stick I bought on "The Popular Online Auction Website." This is also one of the only units that comes already with 10Gbe ports, in case you have the hardware to set that up. I'm just using the standard 1Gbe wired ethernet and it's more than what I need. Internal read/writes are lightning fast too. The unit is quick, snappy, and responsive.
I'm super happy with unit, and recommend it highly. Hopefully Synology keeps releasing big server boxes like this one within the Value series. I have no need for a Plus series so this one for my use case is the sweet spot.
