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.
Pros:
- Powerful hardware
- On-the-fly 4K hardware transcoding
- Hardware encryption engine
- Small footprint, eco-friendly, and silent
- Strong media performance
Cons:
- None
“The DS118 is a perfect NAS if you don’t need drive redundancy. It keeps things simple, yet, delivers a strong performance.”
Thank You, Synology, for this review sample.
Great review Bohs!!
I would like to ask you a question: is it possible to connect an USB WiFi dongle to the DS118? I was thinking about the ASUS AC56, but can’t find any data of it. Even on Synology web site, there is no option to look for Wifi dongles for the DS118. Starting to wonder if this is a problem of data not being actualized for the DS118 model, or maybe it is not compatible at all.
Thanks a lot in advance,
Jordi
In general, Synology’s DSM does support wireless network and Bluetooth dongles – however – I haven’t tested it on the DS118 directly. There might be issues with specific USB dongles due to driver support, but most should work. At this point, my best advice would be to generally search for which USB WiFi adapters other people successfully have used on Synology NAS. It doesn’t matter which device in the end, whether it’s the DS118 or another DiskStation.
I don’t have any WiFi dongles in the office currently except for a “slow” Linksys AC600 one (WUSB6100M), so I can’t test it for compatibility with the AC56.
Alternatively, you could try and contact Synology directly through their support. They might be able to come with more specific information in regard to the ASUS AC56.