Synology DiskStation DS1817 Review

The Synology DiskStation DS1817 is a high capacity, full-featured NAS solution that promises to bring high-end functionality and performance to the SMB market, all at an affordable price point.

The goal of this review was to compare the value-based DS1817 over the DS1517+. As far as build quality goes, I'd say both units are equally well-built. For the most part, chassis components are shared with an inner metal structure wrapped in ABS plastic.

Synology's DS1817 DiskStation is an 8-bay Annapurna Labs-powered NAS with 4 GB of memory (expandable to 8 GB) with two Gigabit Ethernet ports and two built-in copper 10 GbE LAN ports. The same hardware platform is available in the five-bay DS1517.

I am impressed by the Synology operating system, and the overall design of the unit is acceptable. Having 4x LAN ports for Link Aggregation is great. Having 2 of them being 10Gig ports is pretty impressive at this price point (I am not using the capability but could be nice for the future).

Synology DiskStation DS1817

The DS1817 manages to effectively blur the line between small business requirements and enterprise expectations, while offering an interesting alternative for those who want high performance external storage.

Great DSM app selection; Performance over 10GbE; Scalability

External drive boxes use eSATA connection; Too few USB 3.0 ports; Less iSCSI IOPS than the DS1817