Synology DS1812+ DiskStation - High Performance NAS Server Scales up to 18 Drives for SMB Users

Comment:
This morning, I was woken up early by a loud, constant beep beep sound coming from the office. It turned out to be this DiskStation. When you are buying a RAID device, the most important thing to consider is how well it handles failure. And in this case, it handled it extremely well.Along with the beeping was the click-click sound of a dead hard drive. Logging into DSM showed me right away the first thing I wanted: the button to turn the damn beeping off, and then it identified the problem. Instructions could have been a little clearer - I did do a web search to make sure my suspicions were correct (That the LED above the drive bay indicated which one was dead - it was off rather than yellow in my case, and that the "repair" feature was how to add the new replacement HDD).I have used different RAID systems in the past, and when they failed, it was a nightmare to fix, and didn't always work as advertised.

Comment:
Excellent NAS. Got the 8-drive model instead of 5 drive because this one uses 120mm fans.Very quiet and fast, and lots of excellent features. Dropbox-style app, remote torrents and audio and video transcoding, even over the internet to an iphone.

Comment:
As business owner and IT consultant, for my own business this is a fantastic unit. We have purchased two units now and use them for our Virtual Machines although good for any machine. The ISCSI protocol in Windows if fantastic and load a drive like it it local to the machine. On my virtualization machines which we have spent about 30K to date, this unit has sped up disk access by factors. My office also replaces disk on about a 3 year schedule. With this unit we just replace disk one at a time and let it rebuild. Then do the next. No down time. As an added bonus, we installed unit in a large fire proof safe and now I sleep better. No worries about theft and much less need for off site backup.

Comment:
Not for the faint of heart (cost wise) - but offers so much at such simple ease of setup. Upgraded ram to 3GB. File transfers from old 410J to this across the network through a managing client (not the best way to do things) was still able to saturate the Gb Ethernet. That was peak approx 60MB/s to the client and back out at 60MB/s. 5TB of data moved over in about 26 hours. Wow. And with the add on units - lots of room to expand. Populated with WD Reds and Seagate 7200rpm drives. Warning - the RAM upgrade was done after the data transfers were complete and needed to find 1066MHz DDR3 RAM - tried faster 1600MHz DDR3 and unit would not boot up.

Comment:
This is a fantastic unit that does everything I wanted in a NAS and more. Outfitted mine with 6x WD20EARS and it's a great media server. Will probably drop  in another one or two at some point in the future and/or add the expansion chassis. Even setup the LDAP server to keep my usernames and password, and UID/GID in sync across my various systems in the house, this was very easy to setup with this unit.