Synology DiskStation DS3612xs review

Synology’s latest desktop NAS appliance is the biggest desktop appliance on the market, with a twelve-drive capacity and 10-Gigabit upgrades. Dave Mitchell finds out if it’s also the fastest and takes a look at the new DSM 4.0 beta, too.

IT Pro Verdict

This high capacity desktop appliance delivers top performance over Gigabit and 10-Gigabit networks, and offers a huge expansion potential via high-speed Infiniband ports. Synology’s list of storage features is probably the best currently available and the next version of its DSM will add useful cloud backup services.

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Real-world speeds for read/write are impressive and backup operations are similarly quick.We created a RAID-5 array using four 2TB Seagate SATA II drives for our performance tests and linked the appliance over 10GbE to Dell PowerEdge R515 and Broadberry dual Opteron 4100 rack servers. Both were running Windows Server 2008 R2 and equipped with Emulex 10GbE dual-port adapters.

With a share mapped to the Dell server, Iometer reported an impressive raw read speed of 670MB/sec. On a second share mapped to the Broadberry server, Iometer reported a cumulative read speed of 1143MB/sec.

Real world speeds are just as impressive. Copying a 2.52GB video file returned read and write speeds of 290MB/sec and 280MB/sec, respectively; while FTP speeds with FileZilla stepped up to 344MB/sec read and 303MB/sec write. Backup operations are similarly quick and a 22.4GB collection of 10,600 files copied to the appliance at 116MB/sec.

The latest Synology DiskStation Manager 4.0 beta adds a wealth of new features, including an improved user interface that adds seven new widgets for monitoring system health and resources, connections, backup jobs and logs. A free anti-virus package is also available and the already excellent Surveillance Station gets even more features, including iSCSI LUN backup.

Synology DiskStation DS3612xs

The latest DSM 4.0 beta offers an improved user interface with extra widgets for monitoring the appliance.

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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