Synology DiskStation DS218j 2-bay NAS review

Synology's DiskStation DS218j is a pretty compact 2-bay NAS, measuring just 222.5mm long by 100mm wide and 165mm high. There are no drive bay doors to access the drives which adds a level of physical drive security but it does mean you have to take the enclosure apart to get at them.

The DS218j has an all-white enclosure apart from one half of the front bezel which is dark grey and home to all the indicator lights and a silver grey panel on the rear of the unit that holds the ports. The vertically stacked front indicators are for; system status, network activity and a pair for hard drive activity.

The rear panel is dominated by the grill for the 92mm Y.S. Tech cooling fan. Under this sit a pair of USB 3.0 ports, a single Ethernet port and the port for the power adapter plug.

To aid in the units cooling, both side panels of the enclosure have cut out Synology branding.

With no drive doors, to access the drive bay you have to separate the two halves of the housing. This is a simple job, made even simpler the first time around as the screws that hold the two halves together are not in place (they are in a bag in the box bundle) but to be honest the enclosure is a really good fit so you could get away with not using them even when the drives are in place. At least they are included for peace of mind if nothing else.

The enclosure slides apart (there's a handy sticker under the case which shows which way to slide to unlock it) revealing the drive mounts. At the time of writing this review, the DS218j supports drives up to and including 12TB of capacity.

The four mounting holes for the pair of hard drives have rubber vibration reducing grommets in them which is a nice detail that Synology has added. The DS218j does support 2.5in disks but only by using the optional Type C Disk Holder which costs around £10.

Physical Specifications
Processor: Marvell Armada 385 88F6820 Dual Core 1.3 GHz
Memory:  512MB DDR3
Gigabit Ethernet Ports: 1
Rear panel connectors: 2 x USB3.0
Front panel connectors: 0
RAID support:  Synology Hybrid RAID, RAID 0 and 1
Cooling: 1 x 92mm
Drive Bays Supported: 2
Maximum hard drive size supported: 12TB
Maximum Capacity: 24TB
Maximum single volume size: 16TB
Internal File System support: EXT4
Dimensions (D x W x H) 222.5 x 100 x 165mm.
Weight: 0.88kg.

Become a Patron!

Be sure to check out our sponsors store EKWB here