Synology DS1618+ Review A Powerful 6-Bay SMB and ROBO NAS

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amalurk

Active Member
Dec 16, 2016
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What makes the Dir copy to and from the NAS so slow compared to the other benches? Many small files copied? Wonder what this would look like with the M.2/SSD cache? Could one re-purpose a 2.5 SSD in one of the bays as a cache drive or can it only SSD cache with their add-in M.2 option?
 

William

Well-Known Member
May 7, 2015
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Yes, many small files.
The few times I have played around with cache these benches come out with lower performance. It really depends on your workloads. I would say if you have a lot of users accessing the NAS is where cache comes into play, but for a single user like most of us cache will not help you much.
Only using 1x SSD it can be either a read or write cache, not both. To get both you need a min of two drives.
 

Evan

Well-Known Member
Jan 6, 2016
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And we you can use the 2.5” ssd in the bays for this as I have read (not done myself)
I like the idea of this NAS but rather high idle (system suspend power consumption 25w) unless it’s an error on the specs page and it’s actually HDD spin down idle then it’s not as bad.

For the $ though you may be better just getting 2 x DS918+ depending on exact requirements needed.

And if you wanted to SSD for cache (not volumes) the DS918+ has 2 x NVMe m.2 slots as well.

Having said this I am not as convinced on the caching and it’s effect, I just decided to add 2 x 8tb drives to a DS218+ to be used just for some basic file share and backup (time machine and raunchy target) and done, cheap solution and seems anyway to perform at the limit of a 1G connection.

As the arrival hints, without 10G already limits are hit with the low end units at 1G
 

William

Well-Known Member
May 7, 2015
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I have both here now, DS918+ and DS1618+.
If you don't need 10G than the DS918+ is a pretty sweet NAS. I currently have 4x 10TB WD Reds installed in it with RAID SHR2.
However the DS1618+ with 10G is a killer NAS as anyone can attest how nice using 10G is, you never want to go back to 1G. The extra drives are a plus.

I wish we could put a 10G card in the DS918+.
 

Evan

Well-Known Member
Jan 6, 2016
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However the DS1618+ with 10G is a killer NAS as anyone can attest how nice using 10G is, you never want to go back to 1G. The extra drives are a plus.

I wish we could put a 10G card in the DS918+.
I wish Synology simply did the right thing and included 10G native from the SoC with the DS1618+ and used those PCIe lanes for some M.2 NVMe love that also wasn’t just dedicated for cache but could also be used for volumes. Then it would be really worth the $$! So much potential just wasted :(
 

William

Well-Known Member
May 7, 2015
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I think it has to do with unit cost.
Higher end units have 10G and M.2 installed for the most part.