Synology DS118 1-Bay Multimedia NAS Review

Bohs Hansen / 6 years ago

Final Thoughts

Pricing

At the time of writing, the 1-bay Synology DS118 can be yours for just £188.90 or $179.99. A fair price for a powerful quad-core NAS.

Final Thoughts

Synology’s DS118 is a simple NAS in the sense that it only has one drive bay, 2 USB 3.0 ports, and one Gigabit Ethernet port. But that shouldn’t hold you back. If you don’t need drive redundancy, perhaps you backup externally instead, and you can do with 12TB or less capacity, then it could be the NAS for you.

You get a powerful quad-core processor with hardware encryption engine and hardware transcoding engine as well as modern DDR4 memory. A combination like that is sure to deliver and we saw it do so in our tests. Despite the power, it comes with a tiny footprint thanks to the 1-bay design. That makes the NAS easy to hide away, and after all, a NAS has to work and not be seen or heard. And the DS118 won’t. Its simple design, eco-friendly power consumption, and low noise generation will quickly let you forget that there is a local system serving you all your files.

Performance

The DS118 delivered the best performance results with media tasks and encrypted files. That’s not really a surprise as that’s what it is built to do. It should be noted that we’ve started to use different hard disk drives from this review forward. Different drives can deliver different results, but it was a needed upgrade to stay with the time.

Easy File Access and Streaming

It is no problem to access your files at any time from everywhere, as long as both you and your NAS has an internet connection. Remote connections are made easy with QuickConnect after which you can use the strong file sharing media streaming abilities from everywhere. The device even handles on-the-fly 4K transcoding for your mobile devices. Speaking of mobile devices, there is another bonus. Synology offers mobile companion apps for Android, iOS, and Windows Mobile.

Personal Cloud Solution

With the easy file access, you can turn your Synology NAS into a personal cloud system too. Synology has a complete suite of apps available for the strict purpose of doing nothing but keeping your devices and files syncronised.