Features:

  • Powerful 6-bay NAS optimized for data intensive applications in small and medium business
  • Ultra-high performance of over 2,231 MB/s sequential reading and 265,000 sequential IOPS reading
  • Intel Pentium D1508 dual-core CPU with AES-NI and 8GB (up to 32GB) DDR4 ECC SO-DIMM RAM
  • PCIe 3.0 slot for optional 10GbE add-on card or M2D17 adapter card for dual M.2 SSD as cache
  • Scalable up to 30 drives with two DX1215 expansion units. Automatic file self-healing detects and recovers corrupted files without user intervention
A great NAS with great performance, if a bit pricey

This is a fantastic NAS with plenty of performance to spare. I see a lot of people asking about Plex transcoding capabilities, and I can tell you that it does fine with a single stream. I transcoded a 4K movie down to 720p WHILE watching it without a single dropped frame. CPU utilization was hanging around 76%. I doubt it could handle multiple streams, but for my usage, that will never be a problem. I chose Synology after a long relationship with QNAP devices because of their simplified ecosystem, and I'm pleased I did. I just wish this model (DS3617xs) had a more modern Xeon processor, but the one it comes with does the job and more.

Five Stars

Works as expected so far.

Does a great job with Plex

Besides storage, this Nas is great and very flexible with the things it allows the consumer to do. Currently put in two 12TB drives and it’s running great.

It's the bomb...

So much more than a NAS. It's the bomb. Highly recommend. Currently I am running my own cloud server like Dropbox, but with terabytes of storage and no subscription fee. IMAP mail server, Itunes server, Movie server, Contacts, Calendar, Online Office clone, and I can access it all anywhere in the world with their free forwarding system. Also runs Dockers and can download torrents while in a vpn tunnel. Very Nice!

This model is much faster then the 1817+ NAS. ...

This model is much faster then the 1817+ NAS. Have owned one for 2 months and really appreciate the bettter performance then my other 2 Synology NAS.

Great NAS with the optional 10GbE NIC

I setup this NAS drive with 6 x 4TB Hitachi NAS drives using RAID5 and a Intel X520-DA2 SFP+ adapter. Connected it to a ESXi 6.5 server with a X520 SFP+ adapter, a direct attached cable and getting great speeds. I did a test on a Windows 2016 Server VM with Diskspd, set the block size to 64K, run the test for 60 seconds, disable all hardware and software caching, measure and display latency statistics, leverage 2 overlapped IOs and 4 threads per target, random 30% writes and 70% reads and create a 50MB test file and got 554 MB/s read, 237 MB/s write. Using the same options but a block size of 128K I got 715 MB/s read, 306 MB/s write.

Fantastic NAS

Fantastic, easy to setup, access and use. Tons of great apps. I quit dropbox and evernote immediately.

Pretty good deal

This is really a NAS that ventures into the Server market with web, mail, DNS, VPN in addition to basic file sharing. The base unit was under $1300, but by the time you put in six 10GB disks, updated the memory (needed if you are going to run many services) and added a 10GB ethernet, then the cost is over $4000. Still for what you get it is a good deal and working well for me. I've moved this over from a Mac Mini OS X server since Apple has abandoned server services in their OS and this is a much improved solution.

100% WIFE ACCEPTANCE FACTOR

I always wanted an enterprise server but I didn't expect it to fit under my entertainment center. There is nothing this NAS can't do!

Great Machine! Handles TV Recording with Ease.

I was a little hesitant to buy this because it is extremely expensive for home/small business use that I'm using it for. However, the fact that it has the Intel Xeon processor made it seem worth it for me since so many of these are under powered. This one is extremely fast! I haven't found any downsides to it besides the price, and I know that I'll be using this for a long time. It comes with 16GB DDR4 ECC RAM, but they make it easy to add two additional 16GB chips bringing it up to 48GB. My RAM utilization is just a few percent so I'm not sure this may be necessary, but I know you do need the RAM upgrade if you decide to use expansion units (for even more storage). This is also going to replace a desktop computer that I've always left on, and now that I have Plex on the NAS I don't need to leave that computer on anymore. Plus this has plenty of power so I know Plex won't have issues transcoding. UPDATE (2017/07/26): I still LOVE this NAS. There are so many things that I have it backing up, and I'm using it with the Backblaze B2 cloud storage so that certain folders that I specify can be backed up to the cloud for pretty cheap (works out to about $5/month per terabyte). I am enjoying all of the benefits of using the BTRFS such as being able to take snapshots of directories without unnecessarily duplicating data. You'll need to install a Synology package called Snapshot Replication in order to take snapshots, but it works great. I can create a snapshot of a shared folder in just a couple of clicks, or have them automatically created on a schedule. If nothing changes between snapshots there will be very little additional space used on the NAS, but if something does change it will essentially create "versions" of the changes so that you can roll back the changes should you need to. Plus you get to decide how many of these snapshots you want to keep, which is awesome! I wanted to start doing the snapshots in the first place because of all the ransomware going around. Without having snapshots in place you could find yourself in a situation where your entire NAS gets encrypted with no way to roll back the files prior to getting hit with the ransomware. You get some kind of protection from that thanks to these snapshots, but without the concerns of using a bunch of additional storage space when things are running smoothly. My family is also in love with an app called Channels for the Apple TV/iOS. We pay a small fee each month for the app, but because of the NAS the app is worth every single penny. We have two HDHomerun Extend units that provide a total of 4 TV tuners we can use to record television shows from an over-the-air (OTA) antenna directly to the NAS. We are located near Chicago and are able to pull in all of the local channels using an antenna in our crawl space, and the Channels app offers a companion package for the Synology NAS that is used to record any of the shows that we want. Plus it has built-in commercial skipping that also runs on the NAS. I am so happy that I spent the extra money to get a NAS with all this power because processing the commercials in the television shows uses up about 20-30% of the CPU power for a single show, and would probably use the entire CPU if it were processing all four at one time. We are really putting our NAS to work between all of the video recording/transcoding/playback as well as it's most important purpose... a way for our small business and family to manage and share files. I'm running this with (12) of the WD Red Pro 8TB 3.5-Inch SATAIII 7200rpm 128MB Cache NAS Internal Hard Drive (WD8001FFWX). I am using RAID 6 (supports up to 2 failed drives) which provides the RAID group with 72.73TB of capacity. I have it all allocated to a single volume, which comes out to a capacity of 69.82TB that I get to use for storage. I do have the unit in a cabinet, but the cabinet does have a fan in it to help with air flow. These are all 7200rpm drives so they run warm. They range from 35ºC (95ºF) to 38ºC (100ºF) even with the airflow system I have in my cabinet. The drives that are not being written to generally sit at the lower temps, while the ones being used are on the higher end. If the unit is not going to be in an open-air environment I highly recommend making sure the enclosure you are putting it in is well ventilated. And then in the Synology software go to "Control Panel -> Hardware and Power -> Fan Speed Mode" and increase the fan speed until you get a temperature/noise ratio that you are comfortable with. I am able to keep the fans on full speed and don't hear any sound from it in my cabinet, but if it was in an open-air room you could probably keep it on the quietest setting and still keep the temperature of the unit down just fine. Here are some of the performance specs that I grabbed directly from the machine for those of you curious: Model: DS3617xs CPU: INTEL Xeon D-1527 CPU Clock Rate: 2.2 GHz CPU Cores: 4 Total Physical Memory: 48 GB (I upgraded it, comes with 16GB DDR4 ECC RAM)

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