Design

Synology DiskStation DS418j is a 4-bay NAS server designed for home and personal users to effectively manage, protect and share data. It features status lights for the disks and network on the front, and two USB 3.0 ports on the rear to connect external disks for backup, or to manually copy files to and from the NAS. This NAS doesn’t offer extras such as front-mounted USB ports or a dedicated USB file-copy button. Moreover, there is a single RJ45 LAN port as well as 2 FANs (80mm x 80mm) at NAS’s back panel. In a common view on background, DS418j is quite similar to DS416j, but different from other DS NASes

The important changes are all on the inside, although drives still have to be screwed into its place. It can support 3.5-inch HDDs, 2.5-inch HDDs or SSDs, which are plugged in by their own screws. Because it is quite strange to set up hard disks, this part will include some instructions. These are steps to plug HDDs into DS418j:

• Remove the 4 screws that secure the back cover, and then put the back cover down carefull
• Lift the upper case and then place it aside
• Load drives in the drive trays.
  – For 3.5” drives: Place the drive in the drive tray. Then tighten the screws to secure the drive in place.
  – For 2.5” drives: Place the drive in the blue area (shown below) of the drive tray. Turn the tray upside down and tighten the screws to secure the drive in place.
• Insert the loaded drive tray into the empty drive bay
  

  Specification

  Compared with the previous version, DS416j, the new DS418j has a RTD 1293 64-bit Dual-core 1.4GHz CPU (instead of a Mavell 32-bit Dual-core 1.3GHz). The processor also has a hardware decryption engine, accelerating the reading of attached storage in encrypted formats Memory is another difference. DS418j has 1GB DDR4 RAM while DS416j just has 512MB of DDR3 one.

  There are two obvious advantages with the DS418j NAS, a low total cost of ownership and a pleasant environment. With a power consumption of about 21.22W during active access and 8.97W when the drives hibernate, it’s a cheap device to run. The noise level is rated at 20.6 dBA which should make it as inaudible as possible. Howerver, both sound level and power consumption will be dependent on the installed drives. Then, you should choose Seagate IronWolf, which type is designed for NAS Synology.

  DS418j is considered to be an upgrade of DS218j. Howerver, file system of DS418j is still ext4 instead of Btrfs. There are some reasons that Synology does not upgrade it, may be, such as: user’s main purpose is mostly for multimedia streaming or home data backup,…

  Software

  It\’s a great NAS for those that want to do more than just file serving and make use of the 80+ applications that the DS418j supports. They cover anything from media servers to content management systems to e-commerce. There are too many to cover here, so I’ll discuss the main Synology apps installed by default, or recommended when you first install the DSM operating system.

  DS418j is a home-user NAS to meet the needs of multimedia entertainment, although it can certainly replace any public cloud (Dropbox, Google Drive,…) with many apps for transfering data. Therefore, I will review about multimedia applications like Audio Station, Moments, Video station.

  Audio Station

  Audio Station gives you a web interface for your music collection, and also works with the DS Audio mobile app. It works well, without messing up your album view by treating featured artists completely differently from the album’s main artist – as is the case with many media servers. Moreover, you can connect Amazon Alexa to Audio Station to play any musics by your voice.

  Video Station

  With Video Station, you could stream both Full HD and 4K video straight to my PC’s browser, without any drops in frame rate. The DS418j does support transcoding. You can reffer these articles for more information.

  https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/Mobile/Can_my_Synology_NAS_transcode_videos_for_my_device

  https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/Multimedia/Can_my_Synology_NAS_transcode_4K_videos_for_my_device

  Moments

  Moments in NAS Synology looks like Google Photo, but has more features due to AI technology. Beside managing photos by their timeline, this app can identify people through their faces, places where you took the photo. Specially, albums classified by topics will be automatically created according to photo’s content.

  Conclusion

  With excellent performance, brilliant softwares and easy setup, NAS DS418j is a great buy from Synology for multimedia entertaining and data backup purposes of home users

  Nguồn tham khảo:

  https://www.nascompares.com

  http://www.synology.com