Synology DiskStation DS218play 2-bay NAS review

Rating: 8.5.

The Synology DS218play is the latest 2-bay addition to the company's Value series of NAS units, a series that starts at with single bay drives and goes all the way up to an eight-bay desktop unit, the DS1817, encompassing a couple of rackmounts (2 and 4 bay) along the way. The Value series has been designed with high performance and data-intensive tasks in mind.

At the heart of the DiskStation DS218play is a Realtek RTD1296 64-bit quad-core CPU with a clock speed of 1.4 GHz. This a major step up from the 1.5GHz 32-bit dual-core STM STiH412 processor used in the previous DS216play model. Also updated in the DS218play is the memory which is DDR4 compared to the DDR3 used in the DS216play although the amount of memory is unchanged at 1GB.

Synology quote Sequential throughput figures for the NAS at 112.83MB/s for reads and 112.1MB/s for writes.

The maximum single disk size currently supported by the DS218play is 12TB giving the unit a maximum supported capacity of 24TB with a maximum supported single volume size of 108TB which is a massive increase from the 16TB of the DS216play.

The Realtek RTD1296 brings with it both hardware and transcoding engines and the latter allows for real-time transcoding of 4K Ultra HD (10-bit H.265 (HEVC), MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-2, VC-1) at a maximum resolution for 4K of 4096 x 2160 and at a maximum frame rate of 30fps.

Synology back the DiskStation DS218play with a 2-year warranty.

Specifications
1.5GHz processor.
1GB DDR4 memory.
Hardware encryption engine.
Hardware transcoding engine.
Single Gigabit Ethernet.
Two USB3.0 ports.

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