Synology Diskstation DS115J 1-Bay NAS Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The Synology DS115j is truly a budget device with its MSPR of just £78 before tax. The NAS is widely available and at the time of writing you can get it for £86.80 at Amazon UK and £81.06 at Scan. In the US it can be found at Newegg for $157.99 and at Amazon for $134.99. In Germany it can be had for €89,00 at Amazon with free shipping.

Overview

The Synology DS115j has a very simple, yet effective design. The white case blends in well and if you place it up against a white wall, you’ll barely notice it. The promised silent operation was offered as well. The fan wasn’t audible at all, so all you’ll hear is the hard drive. But even that sound is fairly well shielded by this device and I didn’t notice the device running at all during my tests. The LEDs are bright enough to be easily seen, but not so bright that they blind you when looking at them. This is a nice thing to see as some tend to use over-bright LEDs.

The DS115j did very well when it comes to transfer speeds. While a device like this isn’t really built to handle encryption, it did that pretty good too. Of course the speeds are nowhere near those of unencrypted drives, but that’s a given here. We also saw that the 3.5-inch drive did a lot better in the tests than the smaller 2.5-inch drive. This is mainly due to the fact that the 3.5-inch version has four times the cache. These tests show how much of a difference the hard drive selection can make when it comes to your NAS, and it’s something worth keeping in mind on your next hard drive purchase. In the most successful of the tests where it simulates 4 simultaneous media streams it managed to achieve over 100 MB/s

The Disk Station Manager (DSM) is an amazing operating system that will provide you with options for anything a home users could want as well as businesses. We will of course have to keep in mind that this is a budget device with limited performance, so running to much at once might bring it to its knees. A general setup for home users won’t have any issues and everything will run smooth. The setup and configuration of this device is a breeze and is nothing to worry about. Even novice users will find it easy to configure it for their needs.

Overall this is a great NAS. It has a superb operating system and a hardware setup to meet the basic needs, and that at an extremely low cost. There is no need to think long and hard if a NAS would be a good thing for you, at this price you should just take it home.

Pros:

• Price, this is truly a budget oriented device
• Software, the DSM system offers you the same options as on all the other Synology devices; and that is a lot.
• Easy set-up
• Good transfer speeds

Cons:

• Not the best at handling encrypted shares

Neutral:

• no eSATA port

“The time where you needed to think about taking the plunge into the world of NAS is over. The Synology DS115j has such a low cost while still providing all of the features you need, therefore making it a no brainer.”

Thanks to Synology for providing us with this review sample.