Synology DS1515+ 5-Bay SMB NAS Review

Introduction NAS devices are the perfect addition to pretty much any company, but small and mediums businesses more than anyone else. It's a cost-effective and versatile solution to keep all your data centralized with easy to use backup mechanisms, just to name one function. Today I'm taking a closer look at the Synology DS1515+ that is a perfect NAS for any Small or Medium Business (SMB) setup with its features, functions, and performance. The DS1515+ is a 5-bay SMB NAS, and that 5th bay comes with more benefits than most people think of right away. A four-bay unit is pretty much what we consider standard these days with its possibilities of RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10. The 5th bay gives us the added safety of being able to have another hot-spare drive in our system for automatic recovery in case one of the other drives should fail. Or you could just use it for extra storage, the choice is really yours. Synology's DS1515+ is a premium device in its class, offering 4 Gigabit Ethernet ports that support failover and link aggregation to maximize the transfer speeds and reliability. Having four LAN ports also allow for more users to access the device at once, without the risk of package bottlenecks. It also comes with four USB 3.0 ports to connect external storage for backups or for the added storage capacity. The USB ports also bring along added functionality for a wide array of other devices such as printers, scanners (requires 3rd party add-ons) and surveillance cameras. The two eSATA ports on the rear allow for the Synology DX513 expansion units to be used to increase the storage even further, but normal eSATA enclosures and drives work just as great when connected through them. The front of the NAS is kept very simple and doesn't feature much besides the drive bays, LEDs, and power button. There are no front USB connectors like we see so often on NAS devices, but they are probably more a thing for home users and not businesses. The device will be setup and will more or less have to do the rest by itself - and spoiler alert: it does. The built-in power supply comes with an inward plug to make sure the power is safely connected, but also to allow you to move it closer to a wall or other objects without interference. This feature is mainly for a secure power connection as the fans will need room to push the hot air out and your network cables most likely prevents you from moving it closer to the wall anyway. We see the two easy removable outtake fans in the image above. Fresh air will be pulled in through openings between the drive bays and the sides where the Synology logo acts as air vents. A clever use for the branding and it looks good every time. The DS1515+ NAS stands firmly on its four big rubber feet that should absorb any vibrations that might occur from the spinning hard drives. The drive bays can all be locked to prevent accidental opening as well as tampering with the setup. Of course, the drive bays aren't just hot-swap able, they're also tool-less for 3.5-inch drives. This makes the installation and setup quite a bit easier. The NAS also supports the use of 2.5-inch drives, but they will have to be mounted in the caddies with screws. Inside the Synology DS1515+, we find a 2.4GHz quad-core Intel Atom C2538 processor with Floating point unit and Hardware AES-NI encryption. There is plenty of power in this device to make sure that transfer speeds and performance aren't affected, even when encryption is enabled. It comes with 2GB DDR3 1600MHz memory, but is upgradeable to 6GB without too much hassle. The SSD cache function can speed up your transfer speeds significant and allow much faster access to hot files. You'll easily be able to max out all four LAN ports without too much trouble. The downside is that it requires two SSDs and thereby two drive bays, but it makes a lot of sense when the expansion units are used. Another feature that administrators will love is the easy integration into almost any environment with VMware, Citrix, and Hyper-V support. It also offers the Central Management System to easy manage all the Synology devices on your network from one location. Personal and commercial cloud integration is just as easy as anything else with the Synology DS1515+, a NAS that doesn't seem to leave many wishes open. Teardown A look inside The Synology DS1515+ allows for easy RAM upgrade as we've seen on the last page, but of course comes with a 2GB DDR3-1600 CL11 pre-installed. The pre-installed module can be switched as well, but it requires a removal of the motherboard and that isn't an easy task in this NAS device. But once removed, we see a quality built PCB with two custom located PCIe connections for the drive backplane and rear IO interfaces. Seen at the bottom is the serial connection that also can be accessed from the outside the device while power and front-IOs are connected at the top. The included flash module for the operating system is built with a Phison 2251 controller and Samsung flash. The rear IO board features the two eSATA connectors as well as headers for the 2 fans and it plugs directly into the motherboard. The drive backplane works the same way and it looks very simple. But it has both a 12 and 8-pin power connector beside the natural power coming from the PCIe connection. Power stability is supported by the added capacitors. Below are close-ups of some of the chips. We see the SST39VF010 1Mbit Multi-Purpose Flash and the EtronTech EJ188H USB3 controller. I could only find the specifications for revision 1 of the EltronTech chip, but according to that it is only capable of delivering 1.25Gbit per port, meaning you won't have full speed over all four ports simultaneous. This will rarely be an issue but should be mentioned. The Marvell 88E1543 takes care of the four Gigabit Ethernet ports. In addition to supporting Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) on the new generation of enabled MACs, it's also capable of implementing EEE with legacy or non-EEE devices by incorporating EEE buffering. System Spec, GUI & Power Consumption System Specification User Interface The DS1515+ is powered by the same familiar DSM we know from other Synology devices, although it now comes in the latest version 5.1 with more features and functions than ever before. It is a great and easy to use operating system that should have a function and feature for almost anything you can think off. Power Consumption Basic Installation and Setup Installation: Once you have connected the DS1515+ to your network and turn it on, lights start to flash and it will be ready shortly. Head back to your workstation and navigate to either of the two URL's mentioned in your quick-start guide. You can use any browser of your choice for this. Your NAS should be found almost instantly this way and there is no need to install any programs to locate its initial IP address or look it up in the routers connection logs. If this should fail, for one reason or another, you also have the option to use the Synology Assistant application. The web-based setup however is great and makes it a lot easier to set the device up. When you hit the Set up button it will ask you to provide the operating system, also sometimes referred to as firmware. You can either let it download the latest version from the internet, which is recommended or you can provide a file manually from your local system. While some might not like this step and would prefer it to have a stock firmware built-in and ready to go, I see this method as a huge bonus. Not only are we sure we get the newest version right away, this saves us a later update that might or might not cost us our settings, but it also makes sure that we have the most secure version available. Next we will need to provide the device with the basic setup information such as administrator password and device name, network settings and whether we want to apply the Synology Hybrid Raid to our disks right away. And that is all that is needed to get started, couldn't be much easier. The installation won't take long and you can lean back and take a sip from your drink while the progress bar fills to 100 percent. The mentioned approximately 10 minutes was a close match on my used 6TB hard-drive. It's to be noted here that all data on the drive will be deleted when DSM is being installed. So if you already have data on the drive, make a backup before you use it. The device will restart when the installation is done and the web page will refresh with the login screen as soon as it is ready. Use the details you've just created to login and you'll be presented with the familiar DiskStation Manager dashboard. If you should get a login error, replace the URL name with the device IP. We're just a few steps away from being done. You'll need to provide a few information on how you'd like the DS1515+ to handle updates and if automatic, then when. You can also install the recommended add-on features right away, or you can skip it until later. You can always change you mind at a later time and add or remove installed add-ons. And that is all the configuration you have to do to get it up and running. If you chose to install the extra service it will take a little while for it complete that action before it takes you to the final page of the setup. It will tell you that you're all set and asks you if you wish to report anonymous feedback to help improve the system. When we arrive at the DSM dashboard for the first time, it will give us a small tour in tutorial mode. This will help new users find the basic functions right away and all you have to do, is click the mouse on the screen a couple of times to get through it. Once you've clicked your way through the tutorial, you can start to create the setup for your personal needs. Network setup It isn't important in what order you continue with your setup, this is just one way to do it. Since the DS1515+ has four network connections, we'll enter our Network setup to create some bonds between them. All you have to do, is select the mode and which connections you'll want to bond with each other. You're also able to set how the new connection bond should get its network assignment, manually or by a DHCP server as well as the usual gateway, jumbo frames, and VLAN settings. Hit apply and wait a little bit until the page refreshes and your network connections are bonded. Basic setup The order we do the final part of our NAS configuration doesn't matter either: the users, shares, and services, this is just my preferred order. I start with the user groups. User groups allow you to easily set access rights for an entire group of people by just adding them to the group. No need to create complicated rights for all your shares each time you add a new user. It also allows you to easily remove an entire groups access to a shared folder when you need to perform maintenance on it. The next part is to create our users. You got quite a few options to set, but there aren't many of them you need to worry about. You'll need to supply a username and a password, the rest is optional. You can have the system auto-generate a password for you and it can also send out an email to the user to inform him of his new account. There are a lot more options to explore, but every one of them is explained. As you get through the create pages, you can assign the new user to the previously generated groups as well as specifying what services they're allowed to use. We will need some folders for all the files we want to share across our network, so we'll also need to set up some shared folders. I prefer to have few basic folders, grouping my files into bigger categories. This allows for faster file-moves from one sub-directory to another as well as easy network-share-mounting. My basic setup is Download, Media, Personal, and Data. But how you set up your shares is completely up to you and your usage needs. Once you've entered the name and otherwise selected what you'd like on the first page, it takes you to the permission page. In the combo-box, you can switch between users and groups. Setting rights for groups is a lot faster than doing it for individual users, and this is one of the places this comes in handy. You basic setup is done, but that doesn't mean you have to stop here. DSM offers a long-range of applications and services from online photo albums and cloud services, to DLNA streaming and download services. Setting up your own private web and email servers has never been so easy either. You can choose to let the DSM system keep your system and all your apps updated automatically, or it can notify you either by email or dashboard notification. Testing Method Test system: Supermicro C7Z87-OCE Intel Xeon E3-1230Lv3 Excelleram EP3001A 2GB PC3-10666 Corsair H100i BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850W Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD Disks in Product: Western Digital RED 6TB 3.5-inch Angelbird SSD2go Pocket We would like to thank Be Quiet, Supermicro, Intel, Corsair, Kingston, Lian Li and Western Digital for supplying us with our test components. 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 as single drive and JBOD. Since this is a Synology device, we also have the SHR (Synology Hybrid Raid) available and both of these modes will be tested as well. We know that a lot of users attach additional storage devices through whatever ports the NAS device has available. In this case, we have USB 3.0 and eSATA at our disposal. I will be testing the USB 3 ports with our Angelbird SSD2go Pocket drive and the eSATA with another WD RED 6TB NAS HDD. HD Video Playback HD Video playback is a reading 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 in 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 by 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 on the drive as the metadata is read, a thumbnail constructed and finally the image viewed. Final Thoughts Pricing The Synology DS1515+ is far from the cheapest NAS on the market, but it packs more than enough features to justify its price tag. Amazon UK has it for £659.04, Scan has it for £666.60 while Overclockers UK offers it for £649.99. US readers can pick it up for $839.99 at NewEgg or for $839.99 at Amazon. German readers can find prices starting from €666.66. Overview The Synology DS1515+ impressed on our testbench with some solid performance figures. But it also looks great with the appealing design and simple caddy front. There aren't any connectors on the front, which some might dislike for quick file transfers from external mediums. It only features the drive bays, power button and LED lights on the front, but in a way that's also part of its appeal and design. The locks on the drive bays are a great feature, not only to keep sticky fingers away from your drives, but also because the drive bays open very easily and you wouldn't want to eject a drive by accident. Speaking of the caddies, they are an amazing design. I love the tool-free design that allows you to mount a drive in mere seconds. The DS1515+ has a good internal power supply and sadly there isn't room for a second one in the chassis. It would have been a great feature for an NAS like this to have redundant power supply. The speeds were amazing and there weren't any hardware limitation that bottlenecked our traffic. The protocol used, in this case CIFS for Windows and the hard drives are what makes the real difference. The DS1515+ also supports the new SSD cache feature, that however takes up two drive slots and requires 2 SSDs. That is a lot to hand over from a 5-bay unit. That is until it is coupled with the extension units and suddenly it makes all sorts of sense. Having the feature on a entry-level SMB NAS, size wise, also allows administrators to test out the impact on their work environment on a small scale before investing in a lot of technology that may or may not benefit their present workload. The powerful quad-core CPU with floating point unit and AES hardware encryption runs with 2.4GHz and the upgradeable ram make sure that you won't run out of performance anytime soon. With two expansion units connected through the eSATA ports, you can reach up to 15 bays for almost limitless storage. Another great bonus are the four USB 3.0 ports for fast portable and temporary storage. Pros: Quad-core CPU with Floating Point Unit and Hardware Encryption Upgradeable memory Quad Gigabit Ethernet USB 3.0 and eSATA SSD Cache ability DiskStation Manager (DSM) operating system Cons: Price Neutral: No front-USB "The Synology DS1515+ would be a solid choice for any small or medium business that wants a reliable and fast NAS full of options. It will suit private needs just as well, but the price might be an issue for some" Thanks to Synology for providing us with this review sample.