Synology DS118 1 Bay Desktop NAS Enclosure

Easy to get setup.Small footprint.Supports upto 24TBLoads of featuresBeginners might get a little bit lost or overwhelmed but don't panic. A very detailed help and support guide is also included.Unit is quiet in operation and you can change the fan profile to suit your needs.The USB ports on the back are full speed. This makes it easy to attach an old backup drive and copy to your NAS in very little time (I managed to copy 350GB in 6 minutes)For a full breakdown, go look at the user manual that you can find online.

Having used an older ds116 with 1tb of storage for 6 months I was used to the Synology NAS. When I started to run out of space I invested in a newer ds118 with a WD 4tb HDD. As NAS units go it's about as simple to set up and use as any. There's lots of online help so I've not encountered any problems or issues yet. It's super quiet, you cannot hear it in operation, and as well as streaming about 750gb of music to my Squeezebox Touch, I've also started copying my music dvds which I'm watching on my smart TV.

This was bought as a replacement for another NAS, and so far it's performing ok. Others have commented on the speed, and yes, data transfer from the old drive was very painful indeed (we did it folder by folder over several nights).However, this drive is used in an office environment (i.e. no large media files), and in this setting its speed is perfectly adequate during daily operations. But given the experience during data migration, I wouldn't want to shift large data volumes to and from the drive on a daily basis.The software is fine, we used the supplied Windows app to set up users and passwords without any undue stress, and are also able to access files from Android (sorry, no Apple devices present, so I cannot comment).

There is so much this little box can do: timed backups, remote access, file sharing, etc. You really do get a lot of functionality for your money. And it's pretty easy to figure most of it out, if you are somewhat tech savvy.As a Mac user the main reason I got this was to set up my automatic TimeMachine backups so they would happen automatically over WiFi. This feature is explicitly supported by Synology, which is handy since Apple have now retired their Time Capsule product. There are fairly clear instructions for how to set this up and I managed to get Time Machine backing up within a couple of hours.However, there is a fatal flaw with how this works. After a few weeks I got a warning from Time Machine saying my backup was corrupted and needs to be started again. This means wiping the old backup and starting from scratch, something that ruins one of the main benefits of Time Machine which is that you can browse back in time to see your files at different dates in history. I looked on forums and found that this is a common problem, and there is no fix. I contacted Synology and they don't accept any responsibility for getting this working, claiming the fault may be with Apple's Time Machine or with my network.So I started the backup from scratch again. For a couple of months everything was OK, but now the same error again. So again I lose all that history. My wife's laptop, also backing up with TM to the same drive, has also had the same error.So in practice it seems like Synology is not a reliable solution for setting up Time Machine over WiFi and I am going to have to revert to plugging in a USB drive once a week. And my drive is now largely useless except as a store for sharing local files. I really hope Synology manage to sort this out. Until that time, if you want to use this with Time Machine I suggest you look elsewhere.

This is not for anyone who is not ready to delve into nerdy techy stuff . If you are comfortable with setting up a home network then fine you will be in your element . Personally ,I'm having a few problems coming to grips with this . It's just taking a bit of time and trying my patience . The actual product is fine and worked out of the box and I believe it to be well worth the money I spent especially as I got a good deal on it !

A very good mid-range NAS.Specifications...- Quad Core 64bit CPU running at 1.4GHz- 1GB DDR4 RAM memory- 112 MB/sec data transfer (reading & writing) - Confirmed IRL- HD & 4K Video Hardware Transcoding on-the-fly- 2 x USB3 Sockets on the back.- DSM 6 (Disk Station Manager)Cautions -- Space for 1 hard drive only. No redundancy, so shouldn't be used as the one-and-only backup.- Internal Hard Drive is EXT4 only. No btrfs.There is not much else to say, other than it works flawlessly, is very fast & responsive, and transfers data at the upper limit of what is possible on a gigabit network. Finally, DSM 6.2 is just the best software interface I've come across for checking & altering network settings. DSM allows you to install apps of various sorts to increase the NAS functionality in multimedia or backup. Definitely recommended.

Very easy to you product to use