Synology DS1821+ 8 Bay NAS DiskStation (Diskless)

The Synology DS1821+ is an 8-bay NAS designed to serve as a centralized storage and data protection hub for small office, home office, and small-to-medium business environments. Built around a significantly faster hardware platform than its predecessor, it delivers 177% higher 4K random read IOPS and 76% faster sequential write speeds, making it capable of handling demanding workloads such as virtualization storage, surveillance recording, and large-scale file serving. Two built-in M.2 NVMe SSD slots allow you to add high-speed cache drives that can boost HDD array performance by 20x or more, all without occupying any of the eight main drive bays.

Scalability is a core strength of the DS1821+. Starting with eight bays, you can attach up to two DX517 expansion units to bring the total drive count to 18, accommodating growing data needs over time. A PCIe 3.0 expansion slot makes it easy to add a 10GbE SFP+ or RJ-45 network interface card for environments that demand higher throughput than standard Gigabit Ethernet can provide. On the software side, Synology's DiskStation Manager operating system includes a comprehensive suite of backup and protection tools—Active Backup Suite, Hyper Backup, and Snapshot Replication—covering everything from Windows PC and server backups to public cloud synchronization and virtual machine protection, all included at no extra licensing cost.