Synology DiskStation DS218play 2-bay NAS review

A compact 2-bay NAS, Synology's DiskStation DS218play measures just 222.5mm long by 100mm wide and 165mm high. With no drive bay doors the hard drives are kept out of sight inside the unit which adds a level of physical drive security for an office environment but the flip side is you have to take the enclosure apart to get at them.

The DS218play has an all-black matt finish enclosure apart from one half of the front bezel which has a shiny high-gloss Piano Black finish and it's this half of the front bezel that holds the four vertical indicator lights; 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 but 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 DS218play 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 touch. The DS218play does support 2.5in disks but you'll need the optional Type C Disk Holder which costs around £10 to fit them.

Physical Specifications
Processor: Realtek RTD1296 64-bit quad-core 1.4 GHz
Memory: 1 GB DDR4
Gigabit Ethernet Ports: 1
Rear panel connectors: 2 x USB 3.0
Front panel connectors: none
RAID support: Synology Hybrid RAID, RAID 0, 1
Cooling: Active 92mm fan
Drive Bays Supported: 2
Maximum hard drive size supported: 12TB
Maximum Capacity: 24TB
Maximum Single Volume Size: 108TB
Internal File System support: EXT4
Dimensions (D x W x H): 222.5 x 100 x 165mm.
Weight: 0.87kg.

Become a Patron!

Be sure to check out our sponsors store EKWB here