Synology Refreshes Budget Range Of NAS Units – Perfect For Media Stations

One and two-bay NAS units are some of the most common on the market, for when all you need is just a simple storage place on the network, without having to worry about complicated RAID setups. Synology is launching its latest range, and with the updated CPUs, they have a new trick up their sleeve – 10-bit H.265 transcoding.

A couple of weeks ago we showed the more business orientated NAS units that Synology are coming out with, sporting Intel CPUs and the like, but the DS418 was the oddball of the bunch in that it had 4K 10-bit support. Today is when Synology rounds out the two-bay versions of that NAS with the DS218play. The same quad-core Realtek CPU allows the unit to transcode 10-bit 4K content (including HDR10) in the newer H.265 codec, down to something more manageable for older TVs and mobile devices, such as 1080p H.264.

If you don’t need the media transcoder, the DS218j is the basic model two-bay NAS that’s all about budget. It doesn’t have all the fancy capabilities and hardware level support for encoding and the like, but it comes with the same DSM OS that Synology is famous for. It can perform all the same cloud syncing and backup automation that its higher-end siblings can do, but without a lot of the costly frills.

The last unit in the lineup is the single-bay NAS, the DS118, so no RAID support or redundancy. Despite the single-bay design, it has, yet again, the same CPU as the DS218 and DS418, so it too can do 10-bit 4K H.265 transcoding. These single-bay units are great if you just need storage pool available without having to worry about setting up network shares through Windows or the like. It’s real party trick is sipping just 4 Watts of power when idle, or 9 Watts with a hard drive in use.

All three new NAS units are gigabit enabled, which will be the limiting factor for speed (about 113MB/s), but they still come with USB support for copying off external hard drives. Pricing for each starts off at $180 for the single-bay DS118, $170 for the no-frills two-bay DS218j, and finally, $230 for the two-bay DS216play with the transcoding capabilities.