Synology USB Station 2 Review

Performance To test the performance of the Synology USB Station 2 we used two different external USB 2 Hard Drives:

• Generic 2.5″ SATA USB2 Caddy with a Seagate 7200.4 500GB SATA2 Hard Drive (Shown as Generic)
• Akasa Integral USB2 3.5″ Caddy with a Samsung HD154UI 1.5TB SATA2 Hard Drive (Shown as Akasa Integral)

To find out how the Synology USB Station 2 preformed we ran multiple tests reading and writing the same data to the drives using both the windows native NTFS file system and the Synology USB Station 2 native file system EXT4. For us to get a good understanding of how different types of files affect the performance we will be using both 2.76GB of mixed pictures to test the read and write speeds of mixed smaller files and also one single 2.76GB zip file which contains the same mixed pictures test data. We also tested the drives directly connected to a PC using USB2, these test results are shown as Direct NTFS on the graphs below.

The graph above shows that unfortunately the read speeds of mixed files on NFTS are disappointing, when looking into this further we discovered that the CPU usage of the device was running at almost 100% so the device is clearly struggling with NFTS native devices. With the drives using EXT4 the performance was much improved.

The graph above shows that when writing mixed files when formatted as NTFS the Synology USB Station 2 really struggled with very low write speeds. It were very impressive to see however that the drives outperformed the direct USB NTFS drives when formatted to EXT4, it also managed faster write speeds on EXT4 that it did reading the same type of files.

EXT4 continues to outperform the NTFS in the single file read test however it was nice to see some respectable performance from the NTFS formatted drives.

It was impressive to see the write speeds of EXT4 be so close to the speeds of direct USB in our single file write tests. Unfortunately the write speeds of the NTFS formatted drives continued to disappoint.