Synology DiskStation DS715 2-Bay Value NAS Review

Introduction It has been a while since I had the pleasure to review a Synology NAS which makes it even more of a pleasure to take the brand new Synology DiskStation DS715 2-bay NAS for a spin. And while it does look ordinary on the first glance, I can tell you it isn't. The DS715 is an expandable NAS server, equipped with a powerful quad-core processor with hardware encryption engine and the ability to expand up to 7 drives thanks to the optional expansion unit. You can't just expand it with extra bays, you can also connect it with Synology's High Availability (SHA) technology that combines active and passive servers into one cluster. The DS715 looks to be a perfect balance between performance, features, and value - so let us take a closer look at it. The Synology DS715 is built around the Annapurna Labs Alpine AL-314 quad-core processor with 1.4GHz. We've previously seen a great performance from just this chip in the DS1515 NAS. The CPU has both hardware encryption engine and floating point unit. The DS715 comes with 2GB DDR3 memory and the drive bays support hot swapping as it has to be. The unit is rated for 16TB raw capacity on its own, but that limitation only exists based on the drives currently available. Nothing should block you from using 10TB or bigger drives ones they become available. If that still isn't enough for you, then you'll just expand the NAS with the DX513 five-bay expansion unit. It gives additional storage on the fly while being supported as if they were internal drives. You can easily expand your overall raw capacity to 56TB with 8TB drives. The two Gigabit Ethernet ports ensure the connectivity to your network. You can set seven modes of failover and link aggregation depending on your switching setup and need for redundancy and increased throughput. 802.3ad dynamic setup is just one of the available, but probably the most important of the modes. The addition of an eSATA port is something I love to see and it is my personal preferred method of connecting external storage. It is also the method of connecting the aforementioned DX513 expansion unit. The two USB 3.0 ports allows you to connect other storage drives, printers, or cameras. The drive trays are tool and screwless, at least for 3.5-inch drives. If you wish to use the NAS with 2.5-inch drives, then you'll need the included screws to mount them. Otherwise you just pull off the sides on the tray, place the hard disk inside and put them back. All done. Slide the trays back into your NAS and get started. Plug and Play. Synology's operating system is called DiskStationa Manager (DSM) and it is now in version 5.2. It is a really robust system that is easy to use and one that brings plenty of features. It also has built-in NVR server, capable of hosting up to 30 IP cameras (900 FPS @ 720p). Two camera licenses are included and more will have to be purchased separately. Windows AD, LDAP, and Domain Trust allow for seamless account integration with the rest of your equipment and also feature user home folders and Windows ACL. It doesn't really matter how you want to connect it, you can. The DS715 also comes with support for Synology Central Management System (CMS). CMS offers both flexibility and convenience for administrators, allowing them to manage all systems from a single point. File sharing works with all major system, may it be Linux, Windows, or Mac OS. Included protocols are FTP, SMB2, AFP, NFS and WebDAV among others. The Cloud Station allows for easy backup from all your system to the DS715 NAS and it also supports Rsync, backup to external drives, other NAS devices, or public cloud offerings. A minor thing, but one that I love, is that Synology included two RJ45 LAN cables with this unit. An LAN cable doesn't cost much and it is really annoying to get a unit as cool as this and then have to head out again to get an LAN cable so you can setup your link aggregation. Not so here, everything you need to get started, except the hard drives, is included. A closer look inside The Synology DiskStation DS715 isn't just small on the outside, it is it too on the insides. It is a compact built system, divided into 3 PCBs: motherboard, rear panel, and SATA bridge. The LEDs and power button are placed on the front of the motherboard itself. The two add-in cards connect via PCIe connectors and the memory is soldered onto the motherboard - so no upgrade possibilities here. The 2GB that the unit comes with should be enough for most people anyway and it has two Realtek TRL8211DN chips for the ethernet connections The SATA bridge doesn't feature anything besides the SATA connectors and the pins so it can connect to the motherboard. The rear PCB, on the other hand, has quite a bit onboard. This is where the USB 3.0 and eSATA ports are located and it's also where the EltronTech EJ168A USB Host Controller is located. The reset button is also placed on the small PCB, but the power connector remains on the mainboard itself. A wise choice and one that will give the most stable power for the processor and the other components. System Specifications, Features & Power Consumption Hardware Specifications Dashboard The default dashboard looks very simple, but you can customize it a lot, drag out the functions you need as direct link, have widgets, multi-tasking, and you can even change the login style to suit your preferences. Software Specifications Add-Ons Power Consumption The chart contains the actual power consumption measured at the PSU connection and while loaded with a maximum amount of drives. Peak, or maximum, power draw will occur during boot times. Setup - Initialization, Storage & Network It really doesn't take much to set up your brand new Synology DS715 NAS. Connect some power and network and boot it up. Now find the quickstart folder and navigate to either of the two URLs provided and your NAS should be found. Click connect and set it up. You'll need to provide the newest firmware now. It is quickly downloaded by clicking the Manual install button and you've completed the biggest step. The DS715 will now initialize the system and drives, preparing it for your initial setup. The NAS doesn't need a lot information, but you will have to provide some. Give the server a name, define your administrator name and password and select whether you want to share the location or not. Enabling automatic updates is recommended, both by Synology and myself. Synology is very fast to fix something when a bug or possible flaw is found and this way you're sure that your files always are protected the best possible way. Do yourself the favor and enable it. You can also connect the NAS to your MyDS account and give it a QuickConnect ID for easy connectivity, but that's an optional step that you can skip. You can of course add all this later if you should skip it or remove it if you add it. And that's it. Your brand new Synology DiskStation DS715 is up and running. Hit the Go button and you're taken to the dashboard and provided with a little tour of the user interface. This is great for first time users and only a few clicks for experienced ones that don't need this. The last page of the start-up guide is the DSM Help page. You can launch this at any time later from the shortcut on the desktop or have a look around right away. Storage The storage manager isn't on the desktop by default, but you can just drag it out for a shortcut, as seen in the introduction you got when you first logged in. This is always the first thing I do as it is one of the most accessed pages for me during these tests. If you only need one volume per disk group, then you can create it straight from the Volume tab, otherwise you'll need to create the Disk Group first. Either way, it is a quick task. Select drives to include and RAID mode and whether you want the DiskStation Manager to check your drives for bad sectors. Your new disk group is ready, but you'll still need to add one or more volumes to it. Adding storage volumes is just as easy as it was to create the disk group. Since we created our disk group first, we only get the option to create multiple volumes, but that doesn't mean that you can't just create one. Allocate the amount of space on the disk group that you want to assign to the new volume and confirm it all. That's it. We're now ready to get started. The new volume is still being optimized and that will have a little impact on performance, but you can already start to use it. Network setup We got a file system running and can set up users and shares, but there is one more step I like to do right away and that is configuring the network setup. Sometimes this can be a bit tricky to get your entire network to work as you want and it is nice to get it out of the way from the start. Luckily Synology made it very easy. The DS715 comes with two gigabit ethernet LAN ports and we'll want to use those the best way possible. To do that, we're going to bundle the two ports with Link Aggregation. My switch supports IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic Link Aggregation so that is the mode I'll pick. Adaptive Load Balancing, XOR, and Active Standby are also supported. You can configure all the important aspects of the network connection before you apply it, such as DHCP IP settings, DNS, Jumbo Frames, and VLAN tagging. Synology's DSM will tell you if it doesn't work and show a red text that it couldn't establish a 802.3 connection. It doesn't and we see that we now got a 2 Gigabit connection. Setup - Users, Services & Backup Users We need to create some more users as you shouldn't be using the admin account for normal connections. Keep that for maintenance. Creating users couldn't be much simpler, you need a name and password. Anything else is optional, but you can set rights, define groups, and quotas. Application permissions as well as speed limitations can also be set for each individual user and application. The rights management is real easy here. You can also define your password and verification processes further in the Advanced tab. User Groups User groups is an amazing feature that can help you to simplify your user rights. Most users from a specific segment will have a lot of similar rights set. With groups you don't need to set them for every single user, but instead of a whole group at once. This also simpliefies changes at a later time, adding or removing rights to a folder for everyone with a few clicks. Shared Folders Depending on what add-on packages you install, you have either no default shares or there might be some. These are rarely enough or the ones we need and that's why it's good that you can create your own. TV Shows, Personal Files, Movie Database, TV Recordings. You can go nuts and create as many as you want. Setup - There is more, Add-Ons & External Devices File Services and Domain Features It doesn't matter whether you got Linux, Mac OS, or Windows-based systems, all of them can connect to the Synology DS715 without any trouble. FTP is probably one of the best file transfer protocols around despite its age. TFTP/PXE and WebDAV connections are equally supported for those in need of them. Should your network run on a domain, then joining that is as easy as entering the details. The same goes for LDAP and SSO Clients. External Acces and Quick Connect We aren't always at home but that doesn't mean that we don't want to access our files. Synology made this easy with built-in dynamic DNS support and automatic router configurations. The Router configuration is a great tool and most modern routers should detect just fine and there is no need to do much here. Should the router detection fail, then you'll still be able to set it up manually. Creating forwarding rules for the installed applications is now as simple as anything we've seen up until now. No need to login to your router and set the rules manually. QuickConnect is another method that allows you to connect to your NAS as easy as possible from any device anywhere. We already did this during the initialization, but as I said back then: You can change it at any time. Security Security is important and Synology added everything you need to keep your data safe. From automatic time-outs to Firewall, it's all there. Add-Ons There are a lot of add-ons to choose from the official Synology apps easily recognized by the Station name, eg. Download Station, Audio Station, Photo station, etc. There are a lot more than the official Synology apps and you can also add other app sources besides the official Synology to find even more apps. Go nuts, there is enough to try out and an app for almost any function. External Devices The Synology DS715 has both USB 3.0 connectivity as well as eSATA. This allows you to connect pretty much any storage device and achieve fast transfer speeds at the same time. So much more And there is so so so much more, so much that I probably could fill 50 pages with images and I wouldn't even have shown it all. If you need it, you'll find it in the Synology DS715. Testing Method Test system: Supermicro C7Z97-OCE Intel Xeon E3-1230Lv3 Exceleram EP3001A 2GB PC3-10666 Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD Sapphire R7 240 2GB Drives used in Test: Intern: Western Digital RED 6TB 3.5-inch USB: Angelbird SSD2go Pocket 512GB eSATA: Angelbird SSD wrk 256GB We would like to thank our sponsors for supplying us with the components needed for the test system as well as drives. Software used: The performance of the system we use to test with isn't a major factor when testing a device of this sort. The performance of the NAS box comes down to the network it is running on, the protocol used to connect, and its own internal hardware. With a device of this sort having so many different applications, Intel's NASPT software covers all the bases and also gives us a set of results that we will be able to utilise and therefore give a benchmark against other similar systems in the future. Intel NASPT (Network Attached Storage Performance Toolkit) performs its test by transferring varying sizes and quantities of data to and from the device based on twelve different scenarios. As part of the testing, the NAS is connected through a Netgear GS724TPS managed Gigabit switch and then to our test bench to give the best real world setup test that we can and the NAS itself will be packed with Western Digital's latest RED NAS drives. Intel's NASPT software does require us to drop the memory down to 2GB, as using any more would lead to data caching and therefore skew the results. I will be testing the NAS box performance under each of the RAID options that it has available as well just a single drive. The USB 3.0 speeds will be measured with our trusted Angelbird SSD2go Pocket drive. HD Video Playback HD Video playback is a read test, where a single 2 Gb file is read in 256 kB blocks sequentially from the drive. This simulates where a 720p HD video is being watched across the network to a media player on the other end. 2x HD Video Playback 2x HD Video Playback works with exactly the same data set as the first HD Video test, however this time the same content is streamed twice from the NAS box simulating two simultaneous streams being made to external media players. 4x HD Video Playback In the same way that the 2x Video Playback streams to the equivalent of 2 external media players at the same time, the test here doubles that again up to a simulated 4 media players. HD Video Record The HD Video Record test is as the name suggests a write test to the NAS box. A single 2 GB file is written to the device in 256 kB blocks sequentially to the disk. HD Playback & Record The HD playback and record test now put the drive under the same single record and playback tests as before, but now at the same time. This will factor for the quick changes needed to switch between reading and writing two large blocks of data across the network to the device. Content Creation For content creation, Intel have simulated access to via video creation applications. This is made up of 98 files with 12 MB reads and 14 MB writes in varying sizes of blocks. The activity is predominantly non-sequential with the majority of access time made up of writing to the drives. There are quiet periods of read/write activity interrupted with busy periods to present a difficult workload on the drives. Office Productivity The office productivity simulation is very similar to the content creation, with a total of 607 files written to and read from the drive. A total of 1.4 GB of data is written to and read from the drive with a close balance between each made - the majority of write access is made up of 1 kB writes. File Copy To NAS This test quite simply put copies a single large file from the test system to the NAS box to show how well the system can sustain a single write speed. The 1.4 GB file is copied to the drive and written in 64 kB blocks. File Copy From NAS File copy from the NAS works in exactly the same way as the copy test, however it works in the opposite direction. The single 1.4 GB file is read off the NAS in 64 kB blocks. Directory Copy To NAS In the directory copy to NAS test, a directory tree representing that of a typical commercially available office suite is copied to the NAS to trace the bulk copy of a complex directory. A total of 2833 files making up 247 MB are moved, but the file sizes vary considerably with an average size of 41.4 kB. Due to the varying sizes of the files, only around 50% of the writes are sequential. Directory Copy From NAS In the same way that the file copy from NAS traces the same file back across to the test system, the directory copy from NAS does exactly the same but to the entire directory that it copied across previously. Photo Album Last of all is a test based around a photo album. When a photo album is viewed on-screen, only the images that you see are loaded from the drive and so when you scroll through the album, the new images have to be fetched and read. The album here contains 169 photos with varying file sizes based on the size, quality and detail in the image. Reading the files in a photo album puts an unusual read load upon the drive as the metadata is read, a thumbnail constructed and finally the image viewed. All Benchmark Tests: Average Throughput Intel NASPT provides a summary at the end of each benchmark, included in this is the average throughput from all the previous test as one number. This is a pretty good overall view of a device and as such I've started to include this as well. The numbers below are the average of the previous 12 tests. Encryption As mentioned previously in the review, security is an ever-growing concern and encryption is a great step to achieve this. As such I will be including a comparison between an encrypted drive and a normal single drive for a basic comparison and to show if and how it will impact on your performance. Our benchmarks are real-world tests and will variate a little. We see above that encryption does have some impact on our performance. But you'll get great speeds from the DS715 even with encryption turned on. Final Thoughts Pricing The Synology DS715 isn't the cheapest on the block, but the price is justified by the features and performance that we've seen. You can find the DS715 at Amazon for $469.99 or £356.63 at the time of writing. If you're located in germany you can find a good deal via Geizhals where it starts at €383.91. Overview Whether you're a small to medium business or a prosumer that wants a great NAS, you won't be disappointed in the Synology DiskStation DS715 2-bay NAS. The DS715 is a complete new line from Synology and it a worthy first unit. The small form factor and tiny footprint that is allowed by this being a 2-bay unit gives you the ability to place it whereever you want, you won't have any trouble finding a spot for it. The black design will make it fit well with other PC systems and monitors that mostly are black these days. The two LAN ports allow for fail over and link aggregation and you can connect extra storage through the USB 3.0 and eSATA ports. With help of the DX513 expansion unit, sold separately, you can even expand the NAS up to a total of seven drive bays and easy 56TB raw storage. With Synology's DSM operating system we know that we'll find every function we want, from business features over backup, to cloud systems and domain logins. If it isn't a default function, then you'll most likely find it in the app center. It isn't without a reason that the DSM system won as many awards as it has. We saw a great performance throughout all our benchmarks, and that includes the encrypted benchmark. While the encryption did have some impact on the performance, it wasn't much. This isn't a feature that you need to worry about turning on, the DS715's quad-core CPU handles this with ease. The only downside on this NAS will be limited to very few people, those who wish to upgrade the RAM. They'll have to pick a different model. Otherwise, this is a great system. Pros: Quad-Core CPU with floating point and hardware encryption Dual LAN USB 3.0 and eSATA Business ready including High-Availability Server Great performance Cons: No front USB port Can't upgrade RAM Price, for some "The new Synology DS715 brings business features, a powerful CPU, and expandability to the market at an affordable price. A great unit for most situations." Thank you Synology for providing us with this review sample.