Synology has been refreshing a slew of their NAS units recently. We recently covered 5 New Synology DiskStation NAS Units Released. Synology released another new NAS, the DS418play. The Synology DS418play is a 4-bay NAS with an Intel Celeron processor and 2GB of RAM.
The Synology DS418play
For those that want a simple 4-bay NAS, the Synology DS418play is a NAS that is going to address a broad segment of the market. Here is the general hardware overview of the NAS:
Some of the hardware highlights are the 4x 3.5″ drive bays, dual 1GbE ports, and USB 3.0 ports.
After reading the specs that Synology sent over, there are a few features beyond the bare essentials that the company is highlighting. Video transcoding and storage are important features in this generation.
A popular use of NAS systems is to store video files for playback later. The Intel Celeron J3355 dual-core CPU also has a hardware transcoding engine for H.264 AVC and H.265 HEVC video. The Celeron J3355 with 2GB of RAM (expandable to 6GB) is not the most powerful CPU combo, but with hardware offload, Synology is accelerating a major feature.
On the storage side, Synology is touting AES-NI cryptographic acceleration support and performance near wire-speed for the dual 1GbE network connections. Beyond the AES-NI another feature Synology has been pushing with their new NAS series is BTRFS support. While we are seeing companies like RedHat shy away from BTRFS, Synology is going all-in on the next-generation storage schema.
There’s a huge market segment that will be just fine with the Synology DS418play. Power users will want to get into the higher echelons of the Synology NAS range. With the enhancements to the video transcoding and crypto accelerators, this is a step up for someone upgrading from a 2-bay NAS.
