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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We had the new DX510 expansion box and were able to connect this to the main unit on the fly and as we added new drives they appeared ready for configuration. With an extra five bays up for grabs, RAID5 and dual redundant RAID6 arrays become realities and a new feature in DSM 2.3 is migration from the former to the latter.

The DS710+ has the same feature set as its larger DiskStation brethren which includes support for Windows, Linux and Macintosh clients plus local or AD authentication. As users are created you can determine their share access privileges at the group and user level whilst quotas allow you to limit how much storage each one can consume.

The new firewall feature is aimed at those that want to link the appliance securely to the internet. Synology provides its EZ-Internet wizard which guides you through configuring your broadband connection and creating port forwarding rules for inbound remote access.

The firewall supports up to 100 rules which can be applied to individual IP addresses or ranges and tweaked for specific services. These include storage services offered by the appliance so you can decide precisely which ones remote users can access.

Backup features are good as the appliance can run scheduled backups of local data to external USB or eSATA devices. Data can be secured regularly to and from other Synology appliances or rsync compatible servers and it can also integrate with Amazon's S3 remote backup service.

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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