let me know where you buy it from, i have been watching it on amazon for a bit and it hasn’t moved from its $299 price
I’m in the UK so can’t get it that cheap! The exchange rate makes it about $370 over here…
They’re basically the same IIRC. If you plan to use a lot of storage the extra bays could be useful.
Well, it’s a month on and thought I’d provide a quick update in case anyone else searches for the DS218+
I now have it set up with two WD Red drives and it seems to be performing really well. The only downside of the NAS was that by default the fan stays on all the time. Given that it was in the TV room it was still audible when there was no other background noise. However, I manged to find out how to change the DSM config file so that the fan now goes off when it’s not doing anything.
I have to say that the Channels software has so far performed almost flawlessly, with just a small glitch when trying to watch HD channels using the web interface.
I’ve had a few issues with SiliconDust’s HDHR5-4DT (UK), whereby it seems to get a problem that makes watching Live TV impossible. However, restarting the device seemed to remove the issue. Given this situation, I was wondering if it’s possible to do a restart of the device from the NAS? Anyone know of a script that would do this, or set it to reboot periodically?
Anyway, I’m sufficiently impressed that I’ve cancelled my cable TV contract!
Mine is very quiet but I have the fan on the lowest setting. Did you upgrade the ram? I’m thinking getting the 4GB stick upgrade. I’m about to setup channels dvr and infuse very soon!
I also had the fan on the lowest setting - and agreed it wasn’t unbearable. However, I thought I’d do my bit for the planet and turn it off when not required. I think Synology are probably being overcautious for those that are pusing the NAS harder than I am.
Given that it’s not doing much more than TV and some back-ups for me, I didn’t bother upgrading the memory. It seems just fine with the standard 2GB configuration.
I have novice questions about the NAS. Mod, I figured that this would be a good place to ask, if not feel free to split this off or let me know to repost.
I got it basically to run Channels Plus so I just used all the defaults when I set it up. I don't have any "valuable" data and to be perfectly honest I have files on my WD Mycloud NAS that I probably can do without. I do manual backups on a separate USB drive from time to time.
Synology 2 bay NAS DiskStation DS218+
2GB DDR3L
WD Red 4TB NAS Hard Drive
5400 RPM Class SATA 6 Gb/s 64MB Cache
3.5 Inch - WD40EFRX
I tried to read the Users Guide but it was too technical for me and I could not decipher if the answer was there.
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thinking about adding a second drive. when I look at the control panel/info center/storage tab I see that under Volume 1 it shows SHR. if I add a drive am I locked into SHR or will I get a chance to change it to JBOD, which if I understand things will allow me to use it as a separate drive instead of linked.
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external drives USB or eSata.
2a. how do I do this? powered or unpowered?
2b. can I use devices that are compatible with my Windows computer or is a different format required?
I had the misfortune of using USB devices on some non-WIndows platforms only to find that when going back to a Windows computer I get device errors. usually Windows can fix the errors, but in two instances it rendered the USB device as unreadable/unrecognized and a total loss.
You could add another drive as a separate volume. Or you could delete your SHR volume and recreate as RAID0 or JBOD.
Some Synology systems allow hooking up an Expansion via eSata, but I don't think the DS218+ has that option. External drives should be USB, don't need to be powered, the synology can power it. You should use a linux filesystem such as ext4 if you want permissions to transfer correctly and enable linux tools such as rsync.
thanks for replying
drives I understand, volumes not so much.
I understand that I need to get to RAID0 or JBOD, the problem is that when I look at the DSM and I use their help app, it says to open the storage manager app/storage pool tab. it then says to select a storage pool then click change raid type. there is no provision to select a storage pool and the only option available in the drop down is change settings. change raid type is greyed out.
so far I have not been able to find the correct path through Synology documentation.
DS218+ does have an eStata port. I don't think I would use it for expansion but use it for faster transfer of data.
I believe that some of the problems that I have had in the past is using drives between windows devices and linux devices. this is leading me to think that I shouldn't use those ports but rather transfer between NAS's and between NAS to other drives through a windows computer.
You cannot change raid type from SHR to RAID0 or JBOD. You would need to completely remove the volume and recreate with these raid types. If you keep it as SHR, a second drive will be a mirror.
On a DS218+, you cannot use an external drive, wether eSATA or USB, to expand the existing volume. It will be an additional external volume. This would be a good place for NAS backups, which are also a good idea, but even more so if you are going to be doing JBOD or RAID0. You should format the external as ext4, since it allows you to move files between the volumes without filesystem permission issues.
Additionally, the eSATA is for connecting to a DX517. This would allow you to add 5 drives, but as a separate volume. It is not intended to attach a single drive.
It doesn't work as an expansion on the DS218+, hence the "2" in the "218" part of the model name. It can be used as an additonal volume of 5 drives, but will not expand the main volume to 7 drives like you can do on a DS718+, nor 9 drive as you can do on a DS918+... etc.
thanks for the information. this is getting beyond my level of comfort.
I'll probably just leave things alone. I don't want to mess up Channel Plus.
as I said before, I just used the standard setup when I installed the unit. the documentation is really not much help. it would have been nice if it said something up front.
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It's not hard to do from storage manager, but you would lose all data and need to start over with a new install of Channels. If you are just starting out with Channels, better to do it now than a year from now when you need the extra storage. But, whether RAID0 or JBOD, there is no redundancy. Even with JBOD, if you have recordings spanned across both drives and one of the drives fails, then your database is going to be inaccurate and you pretty much will need to wipe everything and start over anyway.... or at least go through every single recording to see what doesn't work and then delete each one from the UI.
I originally started with a DS216+. I thought it was good, but ended up selling it and getting a DS916+. I since have expanded it with a DX513, making 9 drives total in a RAID6 array. It has been running perfectly for years now... even with one drive failing at about the 3 year mark. I sent it back to WD and they replaced it immediately under warranty. While the new drive was coming in the mail, all my server tools plus Channels just kept on running flawlessly even with the array in a degraded state.
If you are doing a lot of recordings, especially OTA recordings which are significantly higher bitrate than stuff like cable or TVE, I would eventually do 1 of 3 things if I had a 218+:
- get two really big drives, like 10TB and keep the RAID1/SHR
- get a DX517 to use as a separate array. Change the channels DVR directory to this volume, since it supports more drives... then you can add more drives to the volume as you need them.
- sell the 218+ and get a 918+ or 1019+ and do RAID5 or RAID6, depending on how much space/redundancy you want to have.
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thanks. I'm not planning to keep much in the way of recordings on Channels Plus so I may bite the bullet and do a full restart one day. I do have a backlog of movies that I thought I might want to see, but mostly the programs I record get deleted after I watch them.
I just got the DS218+ to run Channels Plus so I just got the one drive when I set it up. the only reason I started to look into add a second drive is that I have another single drive NAS and had thought of adding the drive to the DS218+ using one only for Channels Plus and the other for what I have on the second NAS then mothballing that NAS.
I'm not really looking at storing large amounts of data. it really just home use and convenience I really don't have any critical data.
You can put a second drive in there and use the drives as two separate volumes.
I'm confused and I feel like this has gone around in a circle or I missed something or I asked the wrong question. below is a screen shot of my one drive. my original question was if I could add another drive to be used as a separate drive not linked to the first and I thought the answer was only if I restart everything to RAID0 or JBOD. the reason I didn't want linked drives is because I thought if the drives were linked without data protection, if one drive failed all was lost on both drives.
You need to restart everything if you are going from SHR to RAID0 or JBOD... these are array types for combining drives. But you can keep your 1 drive and add a 2nd as a new volume.