Synology DiskStation DS1812+ review

Dave Mitchell Read more June 6, 2012

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£760

Price when reviewed

Synology must believe there’s life left yet in Intel’s trusty Atom, equipping its first eight-bay desktop appliance with the latest dual-core 2.13GHz D2700. The DS1812+ also introduces Synology’s DiskStation Manager (DSM) 4 firmware, which adds a heap of new features including cloud backup services.

Synology has already certified Hitachi’s 4TB SATA drives for use with the DS1812+, so capacity can be pushed to 32TB. The two eSATA ports at the rear can be used to add a couple of five-bay DX510 expansion units, which takes this to an impressive 72TB.

The Assistant utility makes light work of installation, and the DSM web interface looks very smart indeed. It has seven new widgets for monitoring system health and resources, connections, backup jobs and logs.

Free antivirus scanning is provided, the Surveillance Station package has been improved, and iSCSI LUN backup has been added. Two cloud services are provided, with ezCloud using Synology’s free DDNS service for secure remote access to shares.

Enabling the Cloud Station package from the web interface brings in remote syncing services for up to 32 file versions. You install the Cloud Station Windows app locally, enter your ezCloud account details and then choose which folder you want synced.

Usefully, the QuickConnect feature doesn’t require router port-forwarding rules; just enter a unique code into the Cloud Station UI instead of the service URL. It worked well: as we added files to our source folder, or modified existing ones, they were synced to the appliance immediately. To restore files, access the appliance’s File Station app remotely and view your home directory. Browse all file versions, choose one to restore and download it to a location of your choice.

Along with the Cloud Station, Synology offers a huge choice of free packages. The antivirus package can run scheduled scans on the entire appliance or on selected shares, and delete or quarantine infected files. There’s a plethora of multimedia features, and the appliance has server packages available for Syslog, LDAP, DHCP and even PPTP VPNs.

For data protection, along with the Data Replicator 3 workstation utility, there are options to secure shares to external devices, another Synology appliance, an rsync-compatible server, or Amazon’s S3 cloud backup service.

The DS1812+ is no slouch in the performance stakes. For speed testing we slipped in four 2TB Seagate SATA II drives and created a RAID5 array. Using a Broadberry rack server equipped with dual 2.6GHz Xeon E5-2670s and running Windows Server 2008 R2, we saw drag-and-drop copies of a 2.5GB video clip return read and write speeds of 101MB/sec and 97MB/sec. FTP speeds were better, with the FileZilla utility returning rates of 108MB/sec and 101MB/sec. It handled our 22.4GB collection of 10,500 files well: the folder copied across to the appliance at an average of 69MB/sec.

At £633 for a diskless model, the DS1812+ offers excellent value. Qnap’s eight-bay TS-859 Pro+ costs slightly more but has a slower 1.8GHz Atom, while Netgear’s elderly ReadyNAS Pro 6 loses you two bays, doesn’t even come close for features, and costs around £30 less. We’d definitely go for the Synology.