Synology DiskStation DS1520+

Product Information

The Synology DS220+ NAS Drive Review – https://nascompares.com/2020/06/01/synology-ds220-nas-hardware-review/ When you have the level of market dominance that Synology has in small business NAS, and you ignore how the market is moving, then trouble is undoubtedly on the horizon. Unlike Qnap when you buy your hardware, you arent forced to pay for syncing from and to your own hardware. Fair warning, You’re going to hear me use the words ‘ brand design‘ quite a lot in this review, because Synology is very conscious of its own aesthetic priorities (both inside and out) with regard to its hardware portfolio. Modelling themselves very much in the profile of Apple, they like to present their solutions as clean, simple and powerfully capable, providing less tech enthusiastic users with a fully-featured and reliable solution. Additional cooling is available on the base of the device along the main controller board area and allows air to flow through the device over the internal storage drives and heatsinks located on the internal PCBs to be dissipated easily.

The Synology DS1621xs+ NAS Drive Review (10/09) – https://nascompares.com/2020/09/10/synology-ds1621xs-nas-review As this system supports SATA drive media, that means it supports up to the very latest 16TB NAS hard drives, as well as the soon to arrive 18TB and 20TB hard drives thanks to heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology towards the end of 2020. That means that the DS1520+ and it’s 5 storage bays provide a staggering amount of storage potential, even in RAID 5 and RAID 6 configs. Alongside the traditional RAID configurations you would expect in a 5 drive NAS system, the DS1520+ also support Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) which allows a more gradual and scaled storage plan, as well as allowing you to utilise drives of different capacities in a single RAID configuration without losing storage overall. SHR is often one of the key reasons that people buy a Synology NAS system after the DSM software. Once your NAS is found, you'll be able to connect and start configuring it. Note that you will see the same device as many LAN ports connected with your NAS. I am using two out of four LAN ports, so I'll see my NAS twice. The DS1520+ certainly represents the familiar hardware design that we have seen from Synology in previous units, as well as been comparable in many ways to both the DS920+ and DS1019+. However, once we take a look at the ports and connections, you are able to see some distinctions that set the DS1520+ apart from these devices. Synology DS1520+ NAS Rev iew – Ports and connections Source: Harish Jonnalagadda / Android Central (Image credit: Source: Harish Jonnalagadda / Android Central)The 4 and 5-Bay Diskstation releases from Synology have always been one of the most interesting tiers of the brand’s desktop solutions. The reason for this is that all too often this scale of system serves as a bridging point between Prosumer & SOHO systems and the small/medium business hardware in their portfolio. This is demonstrated first in the scale of the available RAID 5/6 storage, but then more so in the scalability and upgradability of these two volumes system, allowing one to two expansions, greater network connectivity (arriving with 2x or 4x LAN ports) and better internal hardware than the more domestic targetted solutions – often with the internal hardware differing considerably between each periodic 2-3yr refresh by the brand. Let’s first look at the internal hardware of these two NAS’ to see how much they differ. The DS920+ NAS first arrived on the scene with some great hardware advantages over the rest of the plus series 2020 systems (DS720+, DS420+, etc), arriving with a 4 Core Intel Celeron Processor that featured integrated graphics, 4GB of DDR4 2666Mhz memory and NVMe SSD upgrade slots. In the two years since its release though, Synology clearly decided to make some big changes in the base level architecture of the plus series and specifically in the DS1522+ to make it considerably more scalable and general business/file-ops focused. The newer DS1522+ features a dual-core AMD Ryzen embedded R1600 that, although arriving with half the cores of the Celeron in the DS920+, has a higher CPU frequency and total achievable frequency in turbo/burst when needed. That said, users will be surprised to learn that this CPU also does not feature embedded graphics, so therefore the DS1522+ will be less CPU efficient at handling multimedia or VM deployment than the DS920+. This system is straightforward, which is great for non-tech users. The first time logging into the GUI, the system will provide you three essential tips for its usage.

Along with a degree of ventilation located around the main hard drive bay area, the Synology DS1520+ also features ventilation on either side of the plastic chassis via a mesh ventilated logo. This has always been one of those little things that Synology features on each of their NAS chassis designs and is a subtle means to promote passive ventilation in conjunction with the twin active cooling fans on the rear. Unlike the disparity in price point between the Synology DS920+ and DS1520+, the internal performance that is possible on both of the systems, like-for-like, is actually quite close. In fact, unless you populate both devices to the fullest extent of their individual hardware architecture, both the DS920+ and DS1520+ will perform near identically both in terms of first and third-party software. This is largely thanks to their near-identical internal hardware, the Intel Celeron J4125 CPU, DDR4 memory and inclusion of NVMe SSD for caching. If you populate these two NAS systems with the same degree of hard drive and SSD media, both of them will perform and execute the DSM software platform very well. It is only when you fully populate each device with more drive (as found in the 5-bay DS1520+ system) that you present the opportunity for increased internal performance, thanks to more hard drives featured in the array. However, this performance difference is still somewhat minimal with regard to RAID performance-boosting support, as a single HDD/SSD drive will barely present at most 50-100MB/s improvement between them. Additionally, this can largely be negated by the fact both systems support NVMe SSD caching (and the IOPs + multi-user accessing benefits it can provide). Although many users would prefer they could use these NVMe SSD for raw storage internally, Synology has been pretty adamant on this subject and want to encourage users to leverage the faster and larger IOPS rated PCIe SSD media towards improving access to larger, slower but more affordable RAID array of hard drives. There is an argument that this CPU and it’s chipset could limit the overall performance of solid-state drives in this system, thereby invalidating NVMe in the DS1520+ for raw storage, but it would be nice to have that option available.Synology High Availability (for Syncing Synology NAS and having instant failover support to ensure constant connectivity) One can only conclude that while developing the DS1520+, the bean-counters at Synology decided that while some improvements were needed, but these needed to be countered by taking some very useful functionality away, disappointingly. Returning to our comparison of old and new, they both sport two USB 3.0, two eSATA, four 1GbE LAN ports and have five internal bays that can take 3.5 or 2.5-inch hard drives or SSDs. The DS1520+ also features an additional USB port for further connection of external storage, as well as a small number of supported 3rd Party USB peripherals. The DS1520+ does not arrive with a visual Port (HDMI, VGA, DisplayPort, etc), so a Keyboard, Video Mouse (KVM) setup is impossible here. But there are several wireless dongles supported by the device, as well as UPS failover devices and network monitoring tools. Also, many of you may already be aware are, but it never hurts to remind people, you cannot use these USB port to directly connect to the NAS system. Devices that utilise these USB Type-A ports will be seen as client devices to the NAS host system and therefore do not work utilising USB protocol in the same way a direct-attached storage (DAS) system might. It is also worth noting that the E10M20-T1 card that upgraded the DS1517+ to 10GbE also gave it two NVMe slots, matching the DS1520+.