Synology RackStation RC18015xs+ review

Synology’s new RC18015xs+ delivers highly available storage but at a price

IT Pro Verdict

The RC18105xs+ performed well during testing and delivered very good NAS and IP SAN performance. Failover is nicely automated but it will interrupt services and for an active/passive fault tolerant solution, it isn’t the best value

Reasons to buy
  • +

    Simple deployment; Automatic failover; Unlimited snapshots; Good performance; Massive expansion

Reasons to avoid
  • -

    Pricey; Active/passive architecture interrupts storage services during failover

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Cabling and deployment

To create a cluster from two RC18015xs+ appliances, we linked their Gigabit heartbeat ports using a standard Cat6 cable. Each link to the production network requires the corresponding ports on both controllers to be connected and we added a single RDX1215sas disk shelf to both of them using the supplied SAS cables.

Powering both units up automatically turns on any attached disk shelves and we then moved over to Synology's standard discovery web portal for further configuration. This found the cluster and installed the latest DSM software for us.

We loaded a quartet of 4TB WD SAS drives and created a single RAID5 array. We could add extra drives as hot spares or expand the array into them but this solution doesn't support SATA drives.

The DSM Storage Manager shows the physical connections between the controller and disk shelves

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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