Synology DS416 4-bay NAS Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

At the time of writing, the Synology DiskStation DS416 can be had at NewEgg for $527.99, at Scan Computers for £341.28, or starting from €429.64 trough Geizhals.

Overview

Let us start out by talking a little bit about the design. The Synology DS416 is as square a box as it can be, yet it is stylish designed with round corners and glossy front plate that hides the drive bays away. The sides feature Synology’s trademark logo-vents in order to provide better air intake and cooling for the components and the front plate also has openings on 3 sides for air intake. You get dedicated, bright, and easy to see LEDs for power and status as well as each of the four drives, but no dedicated LEDs for the USB access or LAN connections. The airflow is taken care of by two 92mm fans on the rear.

There isn’t an abundance on ports or connection on the DS416, but there is what you need. We find a front faced USB 3.0 port and two more USB 3.0 ports on the rear of the NAS where the two Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 ports also are. Other than that it only features a power connector and a Kensington lock.

The noise level is low and I never really noticed it running during my benchmarks and testing, and that is no surprise with a rating of just 20.2dBA. It is also an eco-friendly NAS with a low power consumption and plenty of power saving features such as customizable drive hibernation times and on/off schedules.

The performance was pretty good too for a system like this and that also goes for encrypted shares and iSCSI LUNs. The CPU is powerful enough to drive these functions aided by its hardware acceleration features for encryption and the floating point unit. Overall, a solid NAS that will perform as it should and offer plenty of features.

Pros:

• Dual LAN for Link Aggregation and Trunking
• Dual-core CPU and 1GB RAM
• 256-bit AES Encryption
• Up to 10 iSCSI LUNs and Targets
• Energy efficient
• Good performance
• DSM Operating System

Cons:

• No eSATA port
• No one-touch copy button
• Memory not upgradeable

“The Synology DS416 is a NAS that offers all the features you want on a solid hardware platform with built-in acceleration features. You can’t do much wrong by getting one of these.”

Thank You Synology for providing us with this review sample.