Synology DiskStation DS710+ review

This little dual-drive NAS appliance is big on features and expansion potential but is it as clever or as fast as Synology claims? In this review we put the latest DS710+ to the test.

IT Pro Verdict

The DS710+ is an expensive dual-drive NAS appliance but it delivers a heap of quality storage features and good speeds over Gigabit. Mirrored arrays will hit performance but the latest firmware adds a range of valuable tools and Synology comes into its own if your future includes big capacity expansion plans.

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Intel's Atom processors are proving to be popular choices for many small business NAS appliances as their combination of low power and good performance hasn't gone unnoticed by most of the big manufacturers.

Synology was an early adopter and its new dual-drive DS710+ sports the latest D410 1.67GHz model. It makes some big performance claims but also teams this up with an impressive features list and a very high expansion potential.

Along with Gigabit and three USB2 ports, you have an eSATA port at the rear which is designed primarily to accommodate Synology's optional DX510 expansion unit. This is a dumb five-bay unit with matching design which presents an extra five hot-swap SATA drive bays to the main unit.

Synology's Assistant utility prepares the hard disks and installs the OS either from the supplied CD-ROM or from a location where the latest firmware has been downloaded to. For testing we loaded the latest v2.3 firmware and popped in a couple of 1TB WD GreenPower drives.

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This new firmware adds a pile of new features with IP SAN support now allowing block level iSCSI targets to be created although this will require an entire physical disk. Synology's hybrid RAID allows drives of differing sizes to be used in the same array and you have optional 256-bit AES volume encryption.

Dave Mitchell
Dave Mitchell

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.

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