12 Bay DiskStation DS3622xs+ (Diskless)

Watch your electric bill. Not recommended for home use.

The system has been reliable and fast. The only downside is I had to invest in their proprietary hard drives, which are way more expensive than regular hard drives. Using a 10G switch and ethernet connection, I get at least 900MB/s write and 1000MB/s read speeds. I've maxed out the memory so that I can have a volume larger than 108TB (I seem to remember the cap was around that amount).

Poor product, have owned 2 prior Synology 12 bay units, no problem. Poor Customer Service

It's unfortunate that Synology no longer allows enterprise drives from other manufacturers, such as the excellent Seagate Exos 16TB drives. The supported drives increase the cost of a fully-populated unit by about $4,000 over Exos drives, and is the only reason I give this box three stars instead of five. I love this unit except for that requirement. I suggest you consider the DS1621xs+, which I also have and love. It's almost as powerful, costs a lot less (especially populated), and supports third-party drives such as the Exos. You can only fit six drives in that box, but you can add two (inexpensive) expansion boxes.

I've been using various western digital NAS drives in my Synology 2419+ for a few years now. The OS does give you a warning, but I've not had any issues. I have 18tb and 20tb drives WD Red Pro and 1 12tb WD Purple working just fine. The same is with the memory. I upgraded it to 32gb non Synology memory chips. It again gives you a warning, but I've not had any issues. It's really bad that Synology tries to make you by their chips and drives.

This synology unit only supports some western digital drives and the proprietary synology toshiba drives. It will run other drives but they force you to look at a "Critical" storage pool message stating incompatible drives. This keeps your storage pool in critical state. Looks like Synology has got a little to greedy this time. We will start replacing our 8 synology system with another brand.

Sadly Synology's new product line only allows you to use Synology brand hard drives without continual nagging error. While the drives may work, there is no way to dismiss this error, thus possibly not noticing a more serious issue. I have been a Synology user for 10 years and will not be purchasing new products until they give the choice of using hard drives without nagging errors that are not their own drives which are 2x the cost of drives like WD Red Pro. Synology must think everyone needing a device this size is loaded with big corporate cash and can spend extra money on their overpriced drives however, many creatives use 8-bay and 12-bay devices due to the large storage needs, and cost per TB becomes important. WD Red Pro drives are a perfectly good option, except for Synology's profit. They are becoming very Apple-esk with this change. Hate it.

After being a Synology fan for a decade, I bought the DS3622xs+ and populated it with 12 brand new 18TB IronWolf Pro drives. To my surprise, the Synology NAS claimed that every single drive was "unverified" and that it "recommend[s] replacing this drive." They are brand new drives! After a bunch of research, I discovered that Synology's newer devices now only officially support their own brand of hard drives, and that this NAS will permanently say "unverified" on anything else, with no support to read critical information like temperature, bad sector count, or other SMART fields. I'm nervous that if I keep the NAS, what stops Synology from actually doing a full lock-out in a software update? I called Synology and a rep said this was a manufactured problem by them and that the Seagate drives "should" work, but that they aren't supported. Thus, the NAS won't have features to detect failing drives. I am really disappointed because I didn't know this prior to my purchase and I've just lost all trust in Synology as a brand. I'm returning it, sadly.