Synology DiskStation DS215j 2-Bay NAS Review

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

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:

When testing a device of this sort, the system that we use to test with is not a major factor in its performance. The performance of the NAS box comes down to the network it is running on 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. The system that we use to run the Intel NASPT software does require us to drop the memory right down to 2 GB as any more than this leads to data caching and therefore skews the results from the NAS box.

I will be testing the NAS box performance under each of the RAID option 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 this will also be tested, of course.

We know that a lot of users attach additional storage devices through whatever ports the NAS device has available. On this NAS we have the USB 3.0 port at our disposal and I will be testing that with our blazing fast Angelbird SSD2go Pocket drive.