Synology DS1825+ NAS, 8 bays, AMD Ryzen V1500B, 8 GB ECC, 2 × 2.5GbE

The eight bays accept both 3.5-inch SATA hard drives and 2.5-inch SATA SSDs, and they are hot-swappable and lockable. With two Synology DX525 expansion units the bay count rises to 18 and raw capacity to as much as 360 TB. You can start with what you need today and add drives as your data grows, without migrating to a new system.

According to the manufacturer, sequential reads reach 2,239 MB/s and writes 1,573 MB/s. Behind that are a quad-core, eight-thread AMD Ryzen Embedded V1500B at 2.2 GHz and 8 GB of DDR4 ECC memory, which corrects small memory errors on the fly. The memory sits in two SO-DIMM slots and can be expanded to 32 GB.

Two built-in 2.5GbE RJ-45 ports offer two and a half times the bandwidth of ordinary gigabit and connect with a standard RJ-45 network cable. When your network backbone gets faster, an add-in card adds 10GbE SFP or RJ-45 connectivity, or 25GbE SFP28 ports. There is no need to replace the NAS when the office moves to a faster switch.

Two M.2 slots take NVMe SSDs that act as a cache. Frequently opened files and databases load faster, while all eight bays remain free for high-capacity hard drives. For backup, replication and recovery the NAS offers licence-free solutions that can protect computers, servers and other devices across your IT setup.

Two 120 mm fans cool the drives, and the manufacturer rates the noise level at 23.8 dB. Typical power draw is 60.1 W, falling to 18.34 W with the drives in standby, and the power supply is rated at 250 W. The unit measures 343 × 243 × 166 mm and weighs 6 kg; power and network cables are in the box. It is rated to operate at 0–40 °C.

Growing businesses that need one central system for files, backups and shared folders; video producers and design studios planning a move to 10GbE or 25GbE networking; and IT administrators who value ECC memory, hot-swap drives and the option to expand to 18 drives.