Every year, spring and fall Synology launches new products into their ecosystem. Earlier in the year, the DS1618+ was launched that takes up the gap between the 1517+ from last fall and the DS1817+.

This new NAS system is a six-bay platform, designed on the latest Intel Atom architecture. The C3538 at the heart operates at 2.1GHz across four cores, 4GB of DDR4 is included in the SO-DIMM form factor but is expandable to 32GB. This unit does and is capable of taking advantage of Synology Expansion units, giving a total drive capacity of 6 for 72TB of Raw capacity internally and 10 more externally with totaling 192TB with expansion. Connectivity of this platform is spread across four gigabit LAN ports with link aggregation and failover support. In addition, we find three USB 3.0 ports and two eSATA ports for expansion chassis. Taking things further, the DS1618+ has a single PCIe 3.0 x8 slot for add-in cards, M2D17 from Synology offers dual m.2 SATA SSD adapter for cache and M2D18 is a dual m.2 SATA/NVMe adapter, optionally you can use the slot for 10Gbe networking as well.