If you ever want your very own piece of the cloud the Synology DS218+ is a pretty good entry point.  I bought mine to replace an aging Cisco NAS-only device – so old it only had standard hard drives because NAS grade drives had not been invented yet.  It is a little disturbing how many attacks a day it repels – eventually I learned how to just automatically reject queries from urls in China, et.al. The list continues to grow. And McAfee runs on it all the time.

Mainly, my DS218 serves three Windows 10 and two Raspian (Linux) ethernet devices, 3 or 4 internet users with secure names and passwords – no guest privileges at all, and a couple of smart TVs. A big thumbs up to the hardware itself and the plethora of software that Synology makes available included under their DSM umbrella.  Their apps generally work really well for home/small user purposes. My small system employs two 4-gig drives in a RAID1 configuration. Today this is a starting point.  In 2007 this was more memory than my Fortune 100 employer had at home office.

Thumbs down on insufficiently clear explanations that make it hard to figure out how to adjust stuff and use it securely behind an AT&T modem/router.  To be fair, more of this criticism should fall on AT&T for not having available a standard modem/router that was made in this millennium and a lack of flexibility in assigning ports.  Their top speeds, according to a really nice tech, is 10/100 and yes he knows gigabit routers are cheap and 40 gig routers are available. What a head slap.

But thumbs down also on the “training seminar” Synology invited me to attend (free) at an upscale Atlanta Marriott location.  The food was great! The seminar – not so much.  It was really just a big advertisement for re-sellers and a total waste of time for the 1/3 of the attendees who were owner/users.