Synology DiskStation DS216play NAS Review
Bohs Hansen / 9 years ago
A closer look
One of the first thing we notice after opening up the DS216play is that the drive mounts are padded, both on the small arms holding the drives and for the screws. This is a really nice touch that absorbs drive vibrations and thereby both reduce the amount of noise the NAS generates and improves the drives lifespan.
The top drive is connected through a simple PCIe x1 to SATA bridge which doesn’t contain much besides the SATA connector itself.
The motherboard doesn’t have many third party onboard features as most is handled by the CPU itself. The top side features the LAN and USB rear connectors as well as the PCIe connector for the second drive and an onboard SATA connection for the bottom drive.
The rear of the motherboard has the CPU itself with a soldered-on heatsink. Next to it are two 512MB DDR3 RAM chips.
The two RAM chips come from SK Hynix.
And the Gigabit Ethernet connection is provided by a Realtek RTL8211E controller.
Below are a few more close-ups on the reset button and connection ports.