Synologymaxxing

I do own DS918+ with just received its last DSM update - 7.4 (you can skip the AI nonsense).

I am really happy with this purchase, as it’s been serving me well since 2018, and I hope it will run for few more years. I run ot it myriad of containers, and fairly recently I even tried moving some workloads from Hetzner to a local Ubuntu VM running on DSM. It’s packed with four 4TB WD Red HDDs since I owned, and in general whole unit has been hassle-free.

If you want to max out this unit further, you can consider the following.

1. Adding SSD drives for storage (I was lucky to buy two 2TB Samsung EVO drives before price hike) - you can work around cache-only limitation using this tool. After major DSM upgrade (which you’re gonna do once as this device reached EOL, lol) you might need to do a full reboot as Synology might be beeping and reporting faulty drives. Worry not - you should not lose any data there.
2. Upgrading RAM to 16GB - it seems 2x8GB is the max what Celeron J3455 can handle (according to random sources), but I didn’t verify it personally; full mem test finishes successfully with two 8GB sticks, so I’m pretty happy with that. In case somebody gonna Google that - I bought used Samsung M471B1G73EB0-YK0 and had no problem with it.
3. Getting UPS (d’oh) - I use some old CyberPower where I replaced battery fairly recently - Synology can read UPS status via USB connection, so you can see power status/remaining battery and configure graceful shutdown if needed.
4. Last, but not least - getting some external SSD/HDD for backups of NAS itself. I do backup most precious stuff - like photos and some stuff in home directories - HyperBackup works like a charm.

The only thing i wish this unit had is a little bit of more juice - the CPU is definitely dated; on the other hand that kinda forced me to optimize and trim my workloads, so I’m gonna look at the bright side.