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Thanks to its vertical mounted drive bays, the DiskStation DS1817+ is pretty compact for an 8-bay NAS measuring 243 x 343 x 166mm. The well built unit is finished in black with a metal cover and a decent quality plastic front bezel.
The indicator LEDs sit above the drive bays, either side of the power button. The two to the left display Status and Alerts while the four to the right display network activity. At the bottom right of the front bezel is a single USB 3.0 port.
The rear panel of the unit is dominated by the grills for a pair of YS Tech KM121225LL 120mm cooling fans. The KM121225LL spins at 2,000rpm producing a airflow of 61.2CFM with a rated noise level of 31.5dB(A). Handily, if you need to clean these fans they are mounted on a plate which can be removed from the rear panel.
To the right of the fans is the blanking plate for the PCIe slot while under them sit the four LAN ports and three USB 3.0 ports together with the reset button. To either side of these ports is an eSATA port.
Each end panel of the unit has Synology branding cut into it which helps out keeping the DS1817+ cool.
The drive bay doors simply lock in position with a small latch but have locks on them to provide physical security. At the top of each door is an activity indicator LED.
The drive trays are made from good quality plastic with the 3.5in drives held in place by simple but effective method. A plastic strip with a pair of pins moulded in sits in each tray side. These pins pass through rubber grommeted holes (helping to reduce drive vibration) and into the mounting holes in the hard drives chassis. The trays support 2.5in drives but these have to be fixed in place with screws (bundled with the NAS) via holes in the tray bottom.
Although the DS1817+ comes in two basic memory configurations; 2GB and 8GB, the NAS actually supports up to 16GB of memory via a pair of SODIMM slots. Access to these slots is via a hatch (held in place by 4 screws) on the underside of the unit.
The DS1817+ uses a Delta Electronics DPS-250AB-44M 250W internal power supply.
To access the PCIe slot you need to remove the cover which is held on by six screws in the rear panel. Currently the slot supports Synology's M2D17 SSD adapter card to add SSD caching capability or the E10G15 10GbE Ethernet card in single port (-F1) or dual port (-F2) versions.
