Synology DS1515+ 5-Bay SMB NAS Review

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.