Synology DS1515+ 5-Bay SMB NAS Review

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.