Synology has finally got around to selling its 2017 line-up, and I’m torn between the 918+ and the 418Play. There’s only about £80 difference between them and given that I’m going to be spending nearly as much again on HDDs as on the NAS, it seems silly to be penny-pinching on the latter. On the other hand, as a NAS noob I’m not sure I’ll really be getting any extra benefit. The main thing the 918+ seems to have going for it is M2 slots for SSD caching, but I’ve no idea how much difference that’s going to make in practice, and of course it’s an extra expense. I’m mainly going to be using it for media streaming and local backup. Any thoughts?
Background: we have both a 412+ (now used exclusively for backups) and a 1815+ (the primary NAS). In addition to more bays, the second has space for 2 SSD cache “drives” like the 918+ does.
In my experience that cache hit rate for our workload is around 75-80%, so FOR US, it is absolutely worth the difference!
Hope that helps,
Diego