It's hard to argue against choosing a Synology NAS for a small business; the brand is the market leader for a reason, and its DiskStation DS725+ is a good example of why. Those familiar with Synology's naming convention will understand this is a '25 model year device. Although it's only a two-bay, the '7' refers to the fact that you can upgrade it with the DX525 five-disk enclosure to give you a much more capable system.

Most other manufacturers let you plug in expansion bays, but here, closer links between the DS725+ and its expansion unit mean you can use the latter to expand an existing disk array in the first. Outgrow the RAID 1 array in your DS725+, and you can add the DX525 with one or more disks and migrate to RAID 5, 6, or 10. That's a great upgrade path for a startup that wants to limit initial expenditure, without having to reinvest if their storage needs scale up.

Elsewhere, the DiskStation DS725+ isn't an especially highly specified device. There's not much wrong with its AMD Ryzen R1600 processor, or the 4GB of RAM you get as standard, but at this price, its single USB 3.2 Gen 1 port is a bit stingy. That's particularly the case given it's chiefly there to connect the DX525 if you need it – once you do, no further expansion is possible.

One other questionable feature comes at the rear, where you'll find the odd pairing of 2.5GbE and 1GbE network ports – many enclosures at this price now offer dual 5GbE. While you can bond both interfaces, we're not sure what their asymmetry means in a multi-user environment – presumably, some transactions benefit from 2.5GbE bandwidth, while some are throttled by 1GbE.

That's it for connectivity; there are no HDMI or audio ports – this NAS can't moonlight as a media centre, and it's not really ideal for surveillance applications.

The DS725+ offers two M.2 slots for NVMe SSDs, which you can use either as a stand-alone fast volume or for read/write caching of the disk array. Here, it's worth noting that Synology currently has the strictest compatibility requirements of any NAS manufacturer. You can use any SATA drive in the main bays, as long as it's not on the incompatibility list, but the operating system will generate a warning for any disk unless it's on the compatibility list. If that seems daft, you can't even use NVMe SSDs not on the list: the DS725+ wouldn't recognise two WD Black modules. Most significantly, at the time of writing, only Synology's own storage products were officially compatible. The company says it's working with third-party manufacturers to broaden this out.

One final thing to mention here is that this enclosure comes with a three-year warranty – a slight advantage when many competitors have only two year backing.

Synology DiskStation DS725+ review: Setting up

As you'd expect, it's physically easy to set up the DiskStation DS725+. It's a small and lightweight device, although it does use a separate power brick. Its lockable drive caddies are tool-less for 3.5" disks, and you get screws in the box for any 2.5" drives. You'll need to flip the enclosure onto its back to access its M.2 slots, which are also tool-free.

This NAS's memory slots are accessed by removing the right-hand drive caddy. It arrives with a single 4GB module and a free slot, making an 8GB upgrade simple and cost-effective. Beyond that, you'll need to remove the supplied module, which supports up to 32GB. While it's ideal to connect and bond both network interfaces, if you're only connecting one, it's important to check that it's the faster of the two.

At nearly five years old, release seven of Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM) is getting a little creaky – version eight is due for release this year. Even so, DSM is still arguably the best NAS operating system out there. Configuration is easy, with simple guides for volume creation at the outset. DSM defaults to Btrf file formats and the added flexibility baked into Synology Hybrid Raid, but you can specify ext4 and standard RAID 1 if you prefer. Helpfully, you can choose to skip a lengthy full drive check for new volumes, while for security, you can encrypt the entire volume from the outset, or shared folders as you create them.

We configured the system with two 6TB WD Red Plus drives in a RAID 1 array. Synology also supplied us with two 800GB SNV3400 series SSDs, which we initially configured as a separate RAID 1 storage pool.

Synology DiskStation DS725+ review: Features and apps

This NAS may not be bristling with physical features, but it makes up for it with a mature operating system and a big collection of apps – 86 at the time of our review. This is where DSM really excels, offering quality apps for a wide range of services beyond simple file serving.

The menu includes DHCP, DNS, mail, proxy, VPN, and Active Directory server apps, for example, alongside open-source resources such as Git Server, Joomla, and WordPress. There are databases, web servers, and surveillance apps, alongside the usual media and streaming services, including Plex. This being 2026, there's also now Synology AI Console, which facilitates external AI integrations with supported Synology apps.

There aren't really any omissions of note, meaning you can configure this enclosure as the hub of a small or growing business. Our only real concern here is that you might need a RAM upgrade relatively soon, especially if you're configuring multiple services alongside data access.

Synology DiskStation DS725+ review: Performance

Those expecting blistering speeds need to remember one simple fact: this NAS' fastest network port tops out at just under 300MB per second. That meant it quite quickly hit the maximum threshold during large file transfers – 5GbE ports would be twice as fast in theory. The odd thing is, however, that the DS725+ didn't seem to get the memo. While it couldn't achieve the impossible, its benchmark performance was a match for 5GbE enclosures over many of our tests.

Even when testing an uncached disk volume, the DS725+ excelled on small file operations, managing 56MB/s write speeds and nearly 60MB/s reads for 4KB operations in ATTO Disk Benchmark. It was mighty on 16KB operations, almost hitting 200MB/s reads. Only on 2MB operations did its lower network bandwidth come into play, with the DS725+ throttled to 296MB/s reads. Unusually, it didn't quite saturate its network connection when writing, achieving 272MB/s. It scored 487 on the PCMark10 Data Drive benchmark, again among the best results we've seen over a 2.5GbE connection. The SSD volume wasn't significantly quicker on benchmarks, with any differences to our disk results mostly fitting within the typical variation between benchmark runs.

Performance on benchmarks is one thing, but happily the DiskStation DS725+ could back it up with strong real-world file copy performance. We copied a mixed 11.1GB dataset to the disk volume from a Windows 11 PC. It took two minutes and 10 seconds, an excellent 92MB/s performance. Reads were even quicker, with the reverse copy complete in two minutes, at 99.2MB/s. The SSDs proved significantly faster here, nudging write speeds up to 105MB/s, and read speeds to 129MB/s – the fastest we've yet recorded on this test.

As with all the NAS devices we test, this enclosure's performance wasn't particularly stellar when reconfigured with the two SSDs on read/write cache duty for the disk volume. We'd expect this could prove faster than a disk-only volume in a multi-user scenario, but on simple transfers it just seems to create overheads, resulting in slightly slower speeds.

Synology DiskStation DS725+ review: Is it worth it?

The Synology DiskStation DS725+ isn't a bad choice for single home workers: it's quite powerful out of the box, and its 2.5GbE connection is more than good enough for typical wireless routers or small network switches. However, it's best suited to startups and micro businesses that need on-site storage that can scale. Here, the ability to add drives and memory should help it keep pace with more users, storing more data, as a small business grows. At the same time, the range of apps on offer provides a low-cost way to add network functionality, potentially delaying the need for investments in more powerful on- or off-premises solutions.

Really, this NAS's only significant weakness is that it has slower network ports than some competitors, with no expansion slot to upgrade them. That may mean it's not ideal for extremely data-intensive use, or for moderate loading in a larger business – although our benchmarks and real-world tests suggest it wouldn't be easily overwhelmed. Provided that's not a concern, it's simply excellent, offering a near-perfect balance between value, performance, and scalability.

Synology DiskStation DS725+ specifications

IT decision-makers are increasingly tasked with achieving more despite constrained and, often, dwindling resources. Their roles demand simplicity in processes while ensuring the continuous security of their most valuable asset - data.

Traditionally, cybersecurity and data protection were prioritized above all else, often at the expense of added complexity and resource strain.

IT teams now face a perfect storm of challenges. The threat landscape is expanding, with ransomware attacks becoming more frequent and sophisticated. Simultaneously, they must optimize budgets, improve efficiency, and simplify technology infrastructure. While this may seem all well and good in theory, in reality, it’s a lot to ask. 

This balancing act often forces compromises in data protection strategies. Many organizations struggle to implement comprehensive backup solutions due to budget constraints, limited resources,, or overly complex systems. Consequently, critical vulnerabilities remain, exposing enterprises to potentially devastating data loss or breaches.

"After collaborating with clients of different sizes and industries, we found that organizations are indeed limited by many real-world factors in the process of protecting data, making it difficult to cover all operational aspects comprehensively," said Liu Jiayu, deputy general manager of Synology's Backup Products. 

"This means that organizations may still be exposed to cybersecurity risks, which is an area that Synology has long been focusing on and eager to provide strong assistance."

Simplifying robust data protection for modern enterprises

Understanding these challenges is crucial for developing effective data protection strategies. IT teams need solutions that address the immediate threats and also streamline the overall data protection process, making it easier to manage and maintain. Solutions must be robust, yet simple enough to deploy and operate without requiring extensive resources or specialized expertise.

Understanding the multifaceted needs of modern enterprises, Synology has developed ActiveProtect to address the most pressing data protection challenges efficiently and effectively. 

By integrating advanced technologies and user-friendly management interfaces, ActiveProtect ensures data protection without the typical complexities or high costs associated with traditional solutions. It sports several key features that translate into significant operational advantages for IT professionals, enabling them to safeguard their data while optimizing performance and reducing overheads.

ActiveProtect offers many benefits:

• All-in-one solution: ActiveProtect integrates hardware and software into a single, pre-configured package. This ensures optimal performance and reliability, saving IT personnel the effort and uncertainty of assembling various components from different vendors.
• Rapid deployment: Setting up and completing a full data backup can be done in as little as 15 minutes with ActiveProtect. This deployment significantly reduces the time and effort needed, allowing IT teams to focus on other critical tasks.
• Centralized management: ActiveProtect offers a single interface for monitoring and managing the entire backup architecture. This centralization simplifies data protection, enabling IT personnel to manage backup policies, monitor local and offsite data, and perform restorations from a unified platform.
• Advanced deduplication: Multi-level deduplication mechanisms save storage space and reduce transmission traffic. By comparing data at the source and performing global deduplication across platforms, ActiveProtect optimizes storage costs and enhances efficiency.
• Scalability and efficiency: Features such as data tiering and encrypted replication make ActiveProtect a scalable and cost-effective solution. Enterprises can define data tiering rules, moving older data to more economical storage solutions without compromising accessibility.

Simplicity, confidence, and cost reduction

Traditional solutions often require extensive configuration and ongoing maintenance, which can be resource-intensive. Synology streamlines this process through its pre-configured nature and centralized management interface. IT teams can monitor and manage backups effortlessly, ensuring that all critical data is consistently protected.

These solutions allow IT personnel to deploy a complete data protection architecture in minimal time. By eliminating cumbersome deployment steps, ActiveProtect ensures that data backup is completed quickly and efficiently. This rapid deployment is crucial in today's fast-paced business environment, where downtime can have significant repercussions.

The rapid growth of data and increased audit requirements necessitate long-term data retention, often leading to escalating storage costs. Synology addresses this issue through advanced deduplication and data tiering technologies. 

Transmitting only changes or different files during backups and performing global deduplication can significantly reduce storage space usage and transmission bandwidth.

Moreover, enterprises can set data tiering rules to move older data to more cost-effective storage solutions. This approach can reduce costs as well as  ensuring that data can be retrieved when needed from a single management interface. Combining these technologies enables ActiveProtect to help organisations build a cost-effective and scalable data protection architecture.

Delivering what IT professionals deserve

Synology’s solutions are next-generation data protection tools that place the customer at the center. They offer streamlined management and outstanding performance, addressing the challenges of 

As cybersecurity threats become more severe, these solutions give enterprises the confidence to tackle various risks and significantly enhance their operational resilience.

By adopting ActiveProtect, enterprises can achieve robust data protection without the usual trade-offs. Synology's innovative approach ensures that data security is no longer a drag or drain, allowing IT decision-makers to focus on confidently driving forward their organizations.

Learn more about the new data protection experience from Synology here.

Cloud computing has transformed the business landscape, introducing unprecedented scalability, remarkable flexibility, and cost-efficiency. 

In fact, according to analyst firm Gartner, worldwide public cloud spending will grow 20.7% to total $591.8 billion in 2023, up from $490.3 billion in 2022. Analysts found that cutting costs was a major factor in the move to cloud. 

"Moving operations to the cloud also reduces capital expenditures by extending cash outlays over a subscription term, a key benefit in an environment where cash may be critical to maintain operations," Sid Nag, vice president analyst at Gartner said when the predictions were published at the end of October 2022. 

“Cloud computing will continue to be a bastion of safety and innovation, supporting growth during uncertain times due to its agile, elastic and scalable nature.”

A similar study by fellow analyst firm IDC also found that the global revenue generated by public cloud services topped the $500 billion mark in 2022. IDC found that organizations are relying more on the cloud for distributed computing, AI, and app frameworks.

“First, it unlocks the next wave of migration for enterprise applications that have previously remained on-premises. Second, it creates the foundation for new AI software that can be quickly deployed at scale. In both cases, these investments are resulting in market growth opportunities," says IDC research vice president Dave McCarthy in the report.

However, despite this growing momentum, it’s important to remember that cloud is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and there are situations where on-premise infrastructure may be more suitable or even necessary. As such, it’s clear that the decision is not always straightforward.

Cloud vs on-premise: What are the differences?

Cloud computing involves providing a range of computing services via the internet, encompassing servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and beyond. Cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offer various types of cloud services, such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Software as a Service (SaaS), that allow customers to access and use these resources on demand, without having to invest in or manage their own physical infrastructure.

On-premise infrastructure, on the other hand, refers to the traditional model of hosting and maintaining your own servers, storage, and other hardware in your own datacenter or office. This means that you have full control and ownership of your IT environment, but also bear the responsibility and cost of purchasing, installing, updating, securing, and managing it.

Cloud vs on-premise: What are the advantages and disadvantages?

Both cloud and on-premise have their own benefits and drawbacks, depending on your specific needs and preferences. Here are some of the main factors to consider when comparing them:

Cost

Cloud computing can help save money by eliminating upfront costs and reducing ongoing operational costs. However, it may not always be cheaper than on-premise, especially for predictable and stable workloads. 

Cloud services may have hidden fees or complex pricing models that can make it hard to estimate or control spending. 

On-premise infrastructure can be more cost-effective overall if you have a large initial investment, but you also must factor in the costs of hardware depreciation, software licensing, security patches, backups, disaster recovery, and staff training.

Performance

Cloud computing can offer high performance and reliability but is also subject to network issues or outages. 

On-premise infrastructure can offer more consistent and predictable performance but is vulnerable to hardware failures or disasters.

Security

Cloud computing can offer high security and compliance, but also introduces new security risks and challenges. 

On-premise infrastructure can offer more security and control but requires more resources and expertise to maintain. 

Scalability

Cloud computing can offer high scalability and flexibility, allowing easy adjustment of resources and services according to changing needs and demands. However, it also requires more planning and management to ensure optimal use of resources and services.

On-premise infrastructure can offer more stability and consistency but requires more foresight and investment to support current and future workloads. 

Unraveling the conundrum: on-premise vs cloud storage

The decision between these two options isn't a mere binary: it's a spectrum. The ideal choice hinges on comprehending your business's unique demands. It's about striking equilibrium between the allure of cloud's accessibility and scalability, and the fortitude of on-premises storage's control and latency management. Synology's Hybrid Cloud Solution emerges as the bridge, harmonizing these two realms for optimum data management.

As you weigh the merits and drawbacks, remember that Synology offers a third path. An integrated approach, fusing the agility of cloud with the solidity of on-premises storage, is within reach. Synology's innovative solution empowers your business to sculpt a storage strategy that aligns precisely with your aspirations.

In the grand tapestry of data management, the threads of on-premises and cloud storage intricately weave together. The final masterpiece lies in your hands, a tapestry tailored to your business's unique essence.

Introducing Synology's Hybrid Cloud Solution

Synology's Network Attached Storage (NAS) transcends conventional data storage. It empowers you to construct a private cloud - a secure hub for data storage, sharing, backup, and retrieval. But what sets Synology NAS apart is its hybrid cloud approach, fusing the advantages of on-premises and cloud storage thanks to the capabilities of Synology C2.

A spectrum of capabilities

• Data management: Synology NAS is your private cloud's core, centralizing data storage. It's adaptable for start-ups and enterprises alike.
• Collaboration tools: Unite teams with Synology's collaboration suite, featuring private mail, instant messaging, and concurrent document editing. Businesses can benefit from seamless cross-office collaboration through synchronized data, which is key for remote and hybrid teams.
• Ransomware protection and business continuity: Shield crucial data from ransomware with Synology's backup and snapshot tech, ensuring resilience and the ability to continue business as usual should the worst happen. 
• Physical security: Ensure premises safety with Synology's Surveillance Station VMS and Synology Cameras. Real-time alerts, IP camera compatibility, and remote management.

Customers can testify to their success as a result of working with Synology, too. 

"We used to use Windows file server combination, and had a hard time managing such a big amount of growing data. Then we looked for private cloud solutions which support quick data restore and easy file sharing,” said Võ Văn Phương Tú, IT Manager, TTT Corporation. “That's why we choose Synology as our partner. Synology NAS is the best alternative of traditional file servers and public cloud storage."

A hybrid horizon

In the quest for optimal data storage, the answer isn't black or white; it's a hybrid shade. Synology's hybrid cloud solution marries the agility of cloud storage with the strength of on-premises solutions. As you contemplate your data management strategy, consider Synology's offerings, where storage transcends into empowerment.

To embark on a journey of enhanced efficiency and security, discover Synology's recommended models at Synology's official website. You can also find more information about C2 Hybrid Share here.  If you seek answers to FAQs or want to explore the ideal Synology NAS model for your business, Synology has got you covered.

Remember, data storage is no longer a choice between two extremes. It's about the synergy of on-premises and cloud storage to design a more resilient future for your business.

Presented as versatile network storage all-rounders, Synology's 12-bay RackStation RS2423+ and RS2423RP+ appliances aim to offer a fine combination of capacity and features for handling duties such as backup, file, and cloud serving. In keeping with Synology's two-year refresh cycle, they step up as replacements for the RS2421+/RP+ models and claim to offer a significant performance boost.

AMD keeps its job in the processing department with the embedded 2.1GHz Ryzen V1500B CPU in the older appliances replaced with a more powerful quad-core 3.35GHz Ryzen V1780B. Memory doesn't see any improvements as this is still pegged at a maximum of 32GB although the RS2423+/RP+ models get a doubling of base memory over their predecessors to 8GB.

Network port permutations see some useful changes as the four Gigabit ports in the previous models have been replaced with a combination of dual Gigabit and single copper 10GbE ports. We review the RS2423RP+ which adds 26mm to its chassis depth to make way for the pair of 370W hot-plug PSUs.

Synology RackStation RS2423RP+ review: Build quality and expansion

For a 12-bay rack appliance, the RS2423RP+ has a pleasingly short depth of 23 inches even with the pair of PSUs at the rear. It's well-constructed with a solid metal chassis and removable rear lid while three hot-plug cooling fans modules are located underneath a separate hatch.

Internally, the layout is very tidy with the AMD CPU mounted by a large passive heatsink. To one side are a pair of long DIMM slots with the base 8GB of memory supplied as a single DDR4 ECC UDIMM stick.

Owners of the older RS2421+ models looking for a timely upgrade should note that Synology has changed the type of rear expansion port as the Infiniband version has been replaced with a mini-SAS HD port. The upshot is if you have a RX1217RP disk shelf you can't move it across as the RS2423+/RP+ only supports Synology's RX1223RP model. 

Further expansion is facilitated by a spare PCIe slot with the compatibility list restricted to Synology's 10GbE and 25GbE network adapters. The RS2423RP+ is also a member of Synology's enterprise family of appliances so its storage device compatibility list is restricted to Synology's own HDDs and SSDs – you can use other manufacturers' devices but warnings will be flagged in the web console and Synology will decline to provide product support.

Synology RackStation RS2423RP+ review: Apps of distinction

Look no further for the best backup apps as Synology's DSM 7.2 software is positively overflowing with them. The Snapshot Replication app manages on-demand and scheduled NAS share plus thin-provisioned iSCSI LUN snapshots and runs remote replication to other Synology appliances. 

The Hyper Backup app handles local, remote, Rsync, cloud, and iSCSI LUN backups and integrates with Synology's C2 Backup cloud service for off-site storage. You can create and manage your own private backup cloud as the Drive app provides Dropbox-like synchronization services for collaboration and file sharing with desktops and mobiles that have the Drive agent installed.

The Active Backup for Business (ABB) app provides a superb range of data protection facilities for servers, workstations plus virtual environments and the best part is it's all free. It supports agent-less backup services for VMware and Hyper-V virtualization hosts along with application-consistent backups of virtual machines (VMs).

DSM 7.2 delivers valuable ransomware protection with immutable storage along with full volume encryption, it offers WORM (write once, read many) policies for NAS folders on Btrfs volumes. Called WriteOnce, you select it during shared folder creation and choose Enterprise or Compliance policies.  

Both options allow you to lock a file immediately, apply an auto-lock timer that stops changes being made after a custom period of inactivity, set a retention period in days, years, or forever, and decide whether files are immutable or can be appended with new data. The stronger Compliance mode stops the storage pool, volume, and shared folders from being deleted by anyone including administrators. 

Synology RackStation RS2423RP+ review: 10GbE performance

For performance testing, we loaded up Synology's HAT5300 HDDs and SAT5300 SSDs along with its E10G18-T2 dual-port copper 10GbE adapter and for host duties, called up the lab's Dell PowerEdge R760xs Gen4 Xeon Scalable rack server running Windows Server 2022. NAS speeds are excellent with a share mapped over 10GbE to the Dell server returning Iometer sequential read and write speeds of 9.3Gbits/sec and 9.2Gbits/sec – in our review of the RS2421RP+, we saw 9.2Gbits/sec and 8Gbits/sec.

Numbers for our real-world tests looked good too, with drag-and-drop copies of a large 25GB file recording average read and write speeds of 5.6Gbits/sec and 5.8Gbits/sec– also faster than the RS2421RP+ by 11.2% and 17% respectively. Our backup test which secures a 22.4GB folder containing 10,500 small files to the share averaged 2.4Gbits/sec while copying the 25GB file to an encrypted folder returned a speedy 2.7Gbits/sec.

For IP SAN testing, we started with a single 10GbE link to a 500GB target on the appliance's HDDs and watched Iometer report sequential read and write speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 8.9Gbits/sec. Using the extra dual-port adapter we created a triple MPIO link to the target which returned impressive sequential read and write speeds of 27.6Gbits/sec and 13.7Gbits/sec.

SSD caching is well worth considering as it will boost random write operations substantially. After adding a RAID10 SSD cache to our RAID5 HDD pool, we saw random write speeds increase from 1.1Gbits/sec to 6.8Gbits/sec with IOPS going from 4,950 to 94,300.

Synology RackStation RS2423RP+ review: Is it worth it?

With a diskless unit costing a shade over £2,000, the RackStation RS2423RP+ is an affordable high-capacity network storage appliance for SMBs. The 32GB memory limit reduces its appeal as a virtualization host but it delivered an impressive turn of speed in our 10GbE performance tests while Synology's DSM 7.2 software presents a wealth of sophisticated data protection apps and introduces support for immutable storage.

Synology RackStation RS2423RP+ specifications 

Data. It’s the lifeblood of modern businesses. By analysing the vast amounts of data that are now accessible to almost all organisations, it’s possible to anticipate customer behaviour and demand, know when robots on an assembly line are likely to need maintenance, and analyse the potential efficacy of new pharmaceuticals.

As the saying goes, though, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing – as many organisations are finding out. With the rising tide of data showing no signs of abating, many are at risk of being overwhelmed by it and there’s no easy resolution; putting an end to data collection isn’t feasible for a modern business and identifying what (if any) extant information can be removed is also an almost impossible task.

Data also presents a risk, as well as being a valuable resource. Malicious actors may want to steal it, it could end up compromised as part of a ransomware campaign, or an innocent mistake could lead to a self-inflicted data breach. Depending on the nature of the incident and how long it lasts, this could be a very costly affair.

Thankfully, there are modern solutions to these very modern problems, and for many the answer may lie in secure, on-premise scalable storage, delivered by a trusted partner.

Cloud capabilities, on-prem assurances

Cloud computing bears some responsibility for the proliferation of data, but it has also been put forward as a way of handling it. Initially, organisations turned to the public cloud – notably hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft Azure – to store the data they were creating.

There’s been a creeping realisation, however, that this is not the best use of public cloud resources and gets very expensive very quickly. Ultimately, the hybrid cloud model and a return to on-premise storage solutions for some workloads – particularly if latency or data sensitivity are an issue – is becoming a more appealing option.

Synology is a leader in storage hardware for businesses of all sizes. For over 20 years it has been producing NAS servers that can be found in data centres and branch sites across the world. It has developed several ranges that offer the scalability and performance of public cloud, without the cost and latency downsides. And, as a trusted partner and number one brand in Switzerland, it can work with customers to ensure the hardware they’re investing in meets their needs exactly.

A century of data

The Imperial War Museums (IWM) consists of five sites – the Imperial War Museum, the Churchill War Rooms, and HMS Belfast in London, Duxford in Cambridgeshire, and Trafford in Greater Manchester. Founded in 1917 at the close of World War I, it houses collections covering all aspects of modern warfare from across the globe, including thousands of hours of video footage.

The IWM has been digitising the vast quantities of tape archival footage in its possession at ever increasing resolutions, as well as adding footage from current conflicts. Most recently, it has switched to 4K resolution with zero compression, which has led to massive data growth with around 15-20TB of footage being added each week and the total size of the collection nearing 2PB.

Finding the right kind of hardware to store all this data on was becoming an ever-increasing challenge for the IWM team. In trying to handle the influx, it had ended up with dozens of NAS appliances, which wasn’t a long-term viable solution.

To solve these problems, the organisation turned to long-time partner Synology. First, two of the company’s FS range of all-flash storage arrays were implemented – the FS2017 and  FS6400 – for ultra-fast writes when footage is being uploaded. These arrays also mean there’s plenty of room to store footage until it’s moved, and backed up to a separate cold storage tape library.

It then replaced the multiple NASes it had with two Synology HD6500 Petabyte Scale Solution, with one acting as a backup for the other to mitigate the risk of any of the precious footage being archived being lost. Each 60-bay unit is capable of storing up to 960TB per chassis and were both recently supplemented by one RX6022sas each, adding up to a further 960TB per unit.

“Not many NAS devices support what we need,” explains Rob Tyler, IT DAMS manager at IWM. “Having the option and flexibility to be able to contact Synology with feature requests, knowing that they will be read, researched with a strong chance they will be put into production is fantastic and reassuring.”

Containing your data deluge

While most organisations aren’t at the centre of an effort to preserve the history of global conflict, nevertheless we have our own data storage needs. It’s important to think about what you want to do with your data, how you want to get it to work for you, and then seek out the best solutions for the job. With Synology, you can work together to discover how on-premise NAS appliances can help you tame the ever rising tide of data in your business.

If your business wants lots of storage capacity but doesn't have the luxury of a rack cabinet, then Synology’s DiskStation DS3622xs+ will appeal to you, as it’s one of the biggest desktop appliances on the market. This imposing black cube presents 12 hot-swap drive bays supporting LFF or SFF drives and partners them with dual gigabit and 10GbE data ports.

Stepping up as a timely successor to the elderly DS3617xsII, the DS3622xs+ has a speedier 6-core Intel Xeon D-1531 CPU, although the base 16GB of ECC DDR4 memory remains the same, as does the maximum 48GB. A notable change is that the Infiniband expansion ports on its predecessor have been replaced with mini-SAS HD ports that support two DX1222 12-bay desktop units.

The DS3622xs+ lacks internal M.2 SSD slots but its PCIe expansion bay accepts Synology’s E10M20-T1 dual M.2 NVMe SSD card, which adds an extra 10GbE port to the mix. You can use the slot to improve your network outlook further too, and the appliance supports a good range of 10GbE adapters from Synology and Intel.

Be careful with your choice of storage devices, though, as the DS3622xs+ is one of Synology’s enterprise models and only supports Synology’s HAT5300 hard disks and SAT5200 SSDs. For testing, we loaded four 8TB HAT5300 disks, which were accepted without any issues, but use uncertified drives and Synology will decline to provide support.

Synology takes security seriously, and the appliance has a separate gigabit port for placing management traffic on a private network. When you run the web console quick-start wizard, it will block you from using the default administrator username, and you can tighten up access controls further with 2FA.

The DSM 7 operating system is pleasing to use and its revamped web console provides easy access to all features. The overhauled Storage Manager app is even more informative, and an advantage of using Synology’s storage devices is that it can update their firmware automatically.

The appliance’s high capacity makes it an ideal backup vault, and DSM 7 offers an impressive range of apps to support this, with the slick Active Backup for Business (ABB) protecting data on Windows workstations and servers as well as VMware and Hyper-V virtual machines. You can protect on-appliance data as the Snapshot Replication app runs manual and scheduled snapshots of Btrfs volumes, while the Hyper Backup app manages all local, remote, Rsync, cloud and iSCSI LUN backups.

DSM 7 brings the cloud further into play, since the system’s configuration can be backed up to your Synology cloud account. It also introduces the Active Insights cloud dashboard, which provides system and storage performance data on all registered appliances, alerts of unusual login activity and details of all Hyper Backup jobs.

To test performance, we mapped a NAS share over 10GbE to a Dell EMC T640 Xeon Scalable tower server running Windows Server 2019. Iometer reported read and write speeds of 9.3Gbits/sec and 8.5Gbits/sec, while our 25GB file copy returned real-world read and write averages of 5.5Gbits/sec and 5.4Gbits/sec.

These speeds are noticeably faster than those we saw when testing the DS3617xs (the DS3617xsII is identical), and IP SAN performance was equally impressive. With a 500GB iSCSI target mapped to the server, we recorded Iometer read and write rates of 9.3Gbits/sec and 8.5Gbits/sec, and swapping to a dual 10GbE MPIO link saw them ramp up to 18.5Gbits/sec and 9.9Gbits/sec.

The DS3622xs+ isn’t cheap, but it delivers a lot for your money and includes a generous five-year hardware warranty. Designed to deliver big storage to small offices, it offers good 10GbE performance and great expansion potential, while the new DSM7 software is jam-packed with great backup utilities.

Synology DiskStation DS3622xs+ specifications

Like good books and chocolate biscuits, you can never have too much storage capacity. Synology’s DiskStation DS2422+ aims to satisfy storage-hungry SMBs, and this mighty desktop appliance‘s 12 hot-swap storage bays make it a great choice as a high-capacity central backup vault, with plenty of room for services such as file sharing and video surveillance recording.

Stepping up as the successor to the three-year old DS2419+ (as well as the identical DS2419+II), it employs the same cuboid chassis but claims a significant performance boost. Once again, we see Synology giving Intel its marching orders as the elderly Atom C3538 CPU in the DS2419+ is replaced with a slightly younger quad-core 2.2GHz Ryzen V1500B CPU.

Base memory remains the same at 4GB of DDR4 (upgradeable to 32GB) but this is now the more reliable ECC variety. Another notable change is the Infiniband external expansion port in the DS2419+ has been replaced with a standard mini-SAS HD port, which supports one DX1222 12-bay desktop unit.

Synology DiskStation DS2422+ review: Build and hardware features

Build quality is excellent, and the DS2422+ is clothed in a very solid metal chassis that’s been designed to make light work of upgrades. For memory, you just undo two screws and slide the side panel off, while the single PCI-E expansion slot is easily accessed by removing the top panel.

The appliance provides the same quartet of Gigabit ports as all previous versions, so you’ll need the PCI-E slot if you want to upgrade to 10GbE. The appliance also lacks M.2 SSD slots but you can address this with Synology’s E10M20-T1 card, which costs £200 and provides dual M.2 NVMe SSD slots as well as a copper 10GbE port.

When it comes to upgrades, you’ll want to pay attention to Synology’s compatibility lists, as its main focus is on its first-party expansion cards. You’ll need to follow this for storage too, as apart from a solitary 4TB WD drive, the only hard disks and SSDs on the list are, unsurprisingly, Synology’s own brands.

You can still use other vendor’s storage devices, but it’s probably not worth the risk. They’ll show up in the web console as unverified, the appliance will warn you it is in danger and Synology states it will not provide technical support.

Synology DiskStation DS2422+ review: DSM 7 features

For testing, we loaded up four 8TB HAT5300 SATA hard disks which were accepted without any complaints. We used Synology’s Finder web app to discover the appliance on the lab network, where it automatically installed the latest DSM 7 software and on completion, we used the DSM Storage Manager app to create a RAID5 storage pool.

The new DSM 7 web interface is easy on the eye and it introduces a range of new features, including storage performance improvements and smarter SSD caching. The Storage Manager app has been revamped to make it more informative, access security has been tightened up with 2FA and you can now back up the system’s configuration to your Synology cloud account.

The latter comes into play with the new Active Insights dashboard which provides a wealth of system and storage performance metrics on all registered appliances. It’ll keep you posted on unusual login activity and show details of Hyper Backup jobs, but doesn’t currently include anything on Synology’s excellent Active Backup Suite of apps.

Synology’s C2 cloud storage has a bigger part to play too. Along with standard cloud backup services, the new C2 Transfer option adds encrypted file sharing while C2 Identity provides SSO (single sign-on) and strong access controls to company resources.

The Hybrid Share feature allows multiple NAS appliances to mount cloud storage for local access - although this requires a C2 Storage Advanced Plan, which costs around £60 per year for 1TB and also adds hourly backup services and deduplication. The cheaper Basic plan drops yearly costs to £51 but is limited to a maximum of 1TB of cloud storage and only offers daily backup services and file versioning.

Synology DiskStation DS2422+ review: 10GbE performance

For our high-speed tests, we installed Synology’s E10G21-F2 dual-port fibre 10GbE adapter in the appliance and cabled it to an Emulex 10GbE card in a Dell EMC PowerEdge T640 Xeon Scalable tower running Windows Server 2019. The DS2422+ delivers on its speed claims, with a mapped share returning Iometer sequential read and write speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 8.7Gbits/sec, as opposed to 9.2Gbits/sec and 4.4Gbits/sec for the DS2419+.

It was the same story for our real world tests; drag and drop copies of a 25GB file returned read and write averages of 5.2Gbits/sec and 5Gbits/sec - increases of 13.2% and 50.2%. The Ryzen CPU also scored better for encryption performance, with our 25GB file copied to an encrypted share at 2.8Gbits/sec for an 84.3% improvement over the DS2419+.

IP SAN numbers also showed marked improvements. A 500GB iSCSI target delivered sequential reads and writes of 9.1Gbits/sec and 7.7Gbits/sec, as opposed to 8Gbits/sec and 6.3Gbits/sec for the DS2419+. Ramping up the pressure with a dual 10GbE MPIO connection to the target resulted in an increase in read speeds to 17.7Gbits/sec but a small drop in writes to 7.2Gbits/sec - although these were still 41% and 24% better than the DS2419+, respectively.

DSM 7 also claims to support Fibre Channel adapters, but the DS2422+ completely ignored the ATTO Celerity 16Gbps FC card we fitted in it. On closer inspection of the DSM 7 features list, we found that only specific NAS models support FC cards and the DS2422+, alas, wasn’t one of them.

Synology DiskStation DS2422+ review: Verdict

The DiskStation DS2422+ is a well-built NAS appliance and its Ryzen CPU makes it considerably faster than the Atom-powered DS2419+. The lack of embedded 10GbE and M.2 SSD slots do count against it though, and you’ll need to pay close attention to Synology’s compatibility lists when purchasing components.

Even so, this big desktop appliance offers a lot for a very reasonable price. SMBs looking for an affordable high-capacity desktop backup vault will find the DiskStation DS2422+ a worthy contender, made all the more appealing by the new DSM 7 software.

Synology DiskStation DS2422+ specifications

If you need to capture, store and manage large archives of security camera footage, the DVA3221 is for you. While it may look like a regular four-bay desktop NAS, it’s designed and configured as a one-stop surveillance hub, so you can simply plug in your IP cameras and go.

In terms of hardware, its key feature is a preinstalled Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card. This provides the horsepower for deep video analytics tasks, allowing you to track people, employ live facial recognition and do plenty more across multiple video feeds.

The DVA3221 is also laughably easy to deploy. After slotting in four 14TB WD Red Pro NAS hard disks and firing up Synology’s web discovery portal, there was almost nothing left for us to do. The portal located the appliance, installed the latest DSM 6.2 software, set up a suitable RAID array, loaded the Nvidia drivers, set up Synology’s own Surveillance Station app and created a shared video storage folder.

Connecting to your IP cameras is handled by the Surveillance Station software. This had no problems finding and identifying our motley mix of Axis, D-Link and EnGenius cameras – the Synology software works with over 7,900 models. The price includes an eight-camera licence, but the appliance can work with up to 32 feeds. The standard live view scales to accommodate however many streams you have set up, but you’re free to switch to a different layout or create your own.

With our cameras connected, we started out by enabling the people-counting feature for a 2MP dome camera mounted on the ceiling by the lab door. It took us a few goes to successfully define the detection zone, but in around ten minutes the software was successfully logging all foot traffic. We could then pull up reports tracking daily, monthly and yearly footfall, and you can also use this feature for live crowd control, triggering an alert if the number of people who have entered exceeds those who’ve exited by more than a preset limit.

Facial recognition proved easier to set up. We began by importing photos of the people we wanted to track, then assigned each one to an account and configured a monitoring zone in the camera view. As soon as a subject entered that zone, the display zeroed in on their face and tagged the box with their name. Unrecognised individuals were flagged up as unknown, and we were invited to import them into the database; the only hitch, for now, is that we found the system had zero ability to identify anyone wearing a face mask.

Person and vehicle detection works by letting you define up to three polygonal zones on the preview screen, and warns you if anyone enters them. A customisable small object threshold stops birds and the like triggering an alert, while a minimum duration time in seconds tells the software to alert you only if someone lingers in a particular place.

Intrusion detection works in a similar way: for this, you draw a line in the preview window and an alert is triggered if anything crosses it. You can pick whether you’re only interested in people crossing to one side or want to track movement in both directions.

Since the footage you capture will almost inevitably contain personally identifiable information, the DVA3221 also includes some smart features to help you ensure GDPR compliance. The whole system can be isolated on a private network, video storage shares can be encrypted and access can be locked down with two-factor authentication, while Synology’s Evidence Integrity Authenticator app can digitally sign recordings to help prove that footage hasn’t been tampered with.

Yes, you could do all of this with a bog-standard NAS, given the right software and a graphics card – but the DVA3221 is a lot easier to deploy and it’s good value. Moreover, it can still double up as a general-purpose NAS, making it an almost irresistible proposition for SMBs wanting an in-house video surveillance solution without the hassle.

Synology DVA3221 specifications

The DS1821+ represents a change of direction for Synology: it’s one of a new range of NAS appliances that ditch the familiar Intel processors and put AMD in the driving seat instead. This model replaces the old DS1819+, and comes with a quad-core 2.2GHz AMD Ryzen V1500B processor in place of the 2.1GHz Intel Atom C3538 CPU.

There are other subtle upgrades too. Memory provision remains the same – 4GB of DDR4, upgradeable to 32GB – but the DS1821+ comes with server-grade ECC RAM to ensure business-class reliability.

And while the DS1821+’s sturdy charcoal-black steel chassis may appear the same as its predecessor’s, its eight hot-swap drive bays are now joined by dual M.2 NVMe SSD slots –although these can only be used for caching and not for regular storage.

If you do need to extend capacity, that can be done round the back, via four USB-A 3.2 ports and dual eSATA ports, which connect to Synology’s five-bay DX517 expansion units.

Next to those connectors sit a quartet of Gigabit Ethernet ports; a free PCIe slot allows for an upgrade to 10GbE, but note that Synology is now focusing on its own-brand cards and no longer supports many third-party vendors. When we tried fitting an Emulex 10GbE card – which had worked fine in the DS1819+ – the DS1821+ simply hung during the boot. Luckily, it was happy to work with our dual-port Intel X520 model.

Installation proved undemanding. Synology’s discovery web portal quickly located the appliance on our network and downloaded the latest DSM 6.2 software. For testing, we installed four 14TB WD Red Plus drives and used the Storage Manager app to combine them into an SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) storage pool.

We’ve certainly no complaints about speed. Accessing the unit over 10GbE from a Dell T640 Xeon Scalable host running Windows Server 2019, Iometer recorded read and write speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 8.7Gbits/sec. That’s just as fast as the DS1819+ for read performance, and a lot quicker for writing – the older model only managed 4.8Gbits/sec.

The DS1821+ aced our real-world tests too. We read a 25GB file from the appliance at 5Gbits/sec and wrote it back at 4.1Gbits/sec, while our backup test using a 22.4GB folder containing 10,500 small files was copied up at an average of 2.6Gbits/sec. Notably, the Ryzen CPU handles encryption much better than the Atom: our 25GB test file was written to an encrypted NAS folder at 2.6Gbits/sec, representing a 63% boost over the old model.

As for software, Synology’s DSM platform offers an exceptional range of features, especially when it comes to data protection. Btrfs volumes support both manual and scheduled snapshots, while the Hyper Backup app manages all local, remote, Rsync, cloud and iSCSI LUN backups from a single console.

The free Active Backup Suite adds extra options, comprising a set of three apps that can secure data on Windows systems, VMware and Hyper-V VMs and cloud data from Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. Recovery features are outstanding: after running agentless backups of VMs on our VMware vSphere 7 system, we were easily able to restore entire VMs back to the host or use the ABB portal to view guest OS files and restore them individually.

Meanwhile, the appliance itself is kept safe by the Security Advisor app, which scans regularly for malware and security issues and offers advice on closing any potential holes.

We’d have liked to see multi-Gigabit ports built in as standard, but even without them, the DS1821+ is an excellent NAS appliance. The AMD Ryzen CPU gives a real performance boost, the software is hard to fault - and it’s great value to boot.

Synology DiskStation DS1821+ specifications

Targeting storage hungry SMBs, Synology’s RackStation RS2421+/RP+ 12-bay appliances deliver a strong combination of power and capacity. Inkeeping with Synology’s two-year refresh cycle, they step up as replacements for the RS2418+ models and claim to offer a significant performance boost.

This is undoubtedly achieved by kicking Intel out and replacing it with AMD – something Synology is now doing with increasing regularity. Out goes the elderly 2.1GHz Atom C3538 CPU in favour of a more youthful quad-core 2.1GHz Ryzen V1500B, and another bonus is support for server-grade ECC memory.

On review, we have the RS2421RP+, which extends its 2U rack chassis depth by an extra 26mm over the standard model to accommodate a pair of 350W hot-plug PSUs. These do bump the price up by nearly £400, but it’s worth having the extra redundancy if you’re running business-critical storage services.

Synology RackStation RS2421RP+ review: Build quality and hardware

Build quality is excellent with the appliance presented in a sturdy steel 2U chassis. The metal drive carriers can’t be key locked but a small tab on each one can be pushed across to stop them being accidentally popped out, and the triplet of hot-plug cooling fans are easily accessed without powering off the appliance by removing a small hatch in the lid.

There isn’t much to see under the lid; the embedded Ryzen CPU is topped off with a chunky passive heatsink and partnered by a pair of long DIMM memory slots, with one occupied by a 4GB module. Memory is the only area where the RS2418RP+ wins out, as it comes with four DIMM slots and supports up to 64GB – twice that of its successor.

There are no changes in the port department, with the rear panel sporting four Gigabit, dual USB 3 and one high-speed Infiniband port for expanding outside the box with Synology’s RX1217/RP 12-bay disk shelf. Further expansion is facilitated by a spare PCI-E slot, but the adapter compatibility list is restricted mainly to Synology’s 10GbE and 25GbE network adapters plus its M.2 NVMe SSD modules.

You’ll want to avoid deviating from the HDD and SSD compatibility list too, as the RS2421RP+ is one of a number of Synology’s enterprise-class appliances that are restricted mainly to its own storage devices. For testing, we loaded up four 8TB HAT5300 SATA hard disks which, unsurprisingly, were accepted without any complaints.

Synology RackStation RS2421RP+ review: Software and apps

Synology is promoting the RS2421RP+ as a versatile storage server and its DSM software seals the deal as it’s packed to the rafters with apps. These cover everything from file serving, collaboration, surveillance and virtualization to backup, data protection and private clouds.

Local appliance data is protected by Btrfs snapshots on NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs, which can be scheduled or run manually from the Snapshot Replication app. Hyper Backup looks after all your local, remote, Rsync, cloud and iSCSI LUN backups from a single console and integrates neatly with Synology’s optional C2 Backup cloud service for essential off-site storage.

The slick Active Backup Suite turns the appliance into a fully centralized backup vault. The free Active Backup for Business (ABB) component can secure servers and workstations plus VMware and Hyper-V virtualization hosts and all their VMs. The suite also provides separate apps for protecting Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.

You’ll need to upgrade the base 4GB of memory to make the most of it, but the Virtual Machine Manager app can host just about any OS you care to name, including virtualized versions of DSM with the price including one license for the latter. It’s easy to use; we created a Windows Server 2019 VM from an ISO file in only 20 minutes and could back it up by taking regular scheduled VM snapshots.

Synology RackStation RS2421RP+ review: 10GbE performance

For our high-speed tests, we installed Synology’s E10G21-F2 dual-port fibre 10GbE adapter in the appliance and hooked it up to a Dell EMC PowerEdge T640 Xeon Scalable tower running Windows Server 2019. For comparison purposes, we took the numbers we achieved when we reviewed Synology’s 12-bay DS2419+ desktop appliance, which has an identical hardware spec to the RS2418+.

The RS2421RP+ clearly delivers on its performance promises. A share mapped to the server returned Iometer sequential read and write speeds of 9.3Gbits/sec and 8Gbits/sec – the DS2419+ was measured at 9.2Gbits/sec for reads and only 4.4Gbits/sec for write. We saw the same improvements in our real world tests with drag and drop copies of a 25GB file recording average read and write speeds of 5Gbits/sec and 4.9Gbits/sec – increases of 7.6% and 46%.

Our backup test secures a 22.4GB folder containing 10,500 small files to the share, and this was 5% faster with the rack-mounted unit compared to the DS2419+. The Ryzen CPU is more efficient than the Atom for encryption duties too, as copying our 25GB file to an encrypted share averaged a speedy 2.6Gbits/sec – a 70% improvement over the DS2419+.

It was the same story for IP SANs: Iometer reported sequential reads and writes of 9.2Gbits/sec and 8.2Gbits/sec for a 500GB iSCSI target as opposed to 8Gbits/sec and 6.3Gbits/sec for the DS2419+. With a dual 10GbE MPIO to the target, read speeds ramped up to 18.3Gbits/sec and although writes fell slightly to 7.2Gbits/sec, these are still 46% and 25% better.

Synology RackStation RS2421RP+ review: Verdict

The RackStation RS2421RP+ is a versatile NAS appliance that has the storage capacity to please SMBs with big backup demands – and for those with even bigger appetites, Synology offers a 16-bay RS2821RP+ version. Its AMD CPU is clearly a much better performer than the Atom in its predecessor, and it delivered speed increases right across the board in our tests.

Pay close attention to Synology’s storage compatibility list though, as using any drives other than those listed will generate warnings in the web console. Nevertheless, Synology’s HAT5300 drives perform very well and its DSM software offers a superb range of features with a wealth of free data protection apps.

Synology RackStation RS2421RP+ specifications

With support for up to 16 LFF drives, the RackStation RS4021xs+ is one of Synology's largest NAS appliances. This 3U rack mounter is aimed at SMBs and enterprises that want a high capacity, general purpose network storage repository and the '+' in its model name indicates that performance is a priority.

The RS4021xs+ is indeed one of Synology's more powerful models, sporting a meaty eight-core 2.1GHz D-1541 Xeon CPU. This is partnered by 16GB of DDR4 ECC UDIMM memory which can be increased to a very usable 64GB.

Synology doesn't explicitly state that it's a replacement for the three-year old RS4017xs+ - and for good reason, as they're virtually identical. Apart from the new name badge, the only physical difference is the RS4021xs+ comes with twice as much base memory as the RS4017xs+.

Synology RackStation RS4021xs+ review: Storage

When populating the appliance with storage devices, pay very close attention to its device compatibility list. As one of Synology's enterprise models, the RS4021xs+ comes under its new verified drive restrictions and the list, unsurprisingly, consists mainly of its recently announced HAT5300 HDDs and SAT5200 SSDs.

The HAT5300 drives are available in 8TB, 12TB and 16TB capacities, are manufactured by Toshiba and come preloaded with Synology's firmware. The list includes a few low-capacity 4TB HDD models from Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital while SATA SSDs are restricted to four SAT5200 models up to 3.84TB.

The cynical may say Synology is attempting to generate more revenue but from a support perspective, it makes a lot more sense. Using tested and verified drives makes it considerably easier for Synology to provide enterprise customers with a full support service, it avoids the blame game when storage devices go bad and the DSM Storage Manager app provides a handy automatic drive firmware update service.

The new restrictions don't stop unverified drives being used, but you'll probably wish you hadn't. DSM will allow storage pools and volumes to be created but the Storage Manager app will issue multiple warnings that the appliance is in danger, and its SMART testing and reporting service will be disabled for unverified drives.

Synology RackStation RS4021xs+ review: Hardware features

The appliance is very well built with three 8cm diameter hot-plug cooling fans under a separate, removable cover in the lid. Power redundancy is covered nicely as the price includes two hefty 800W hot-plug PSUs.

Port permutations are the same as the RS4017xs+, with the rear panel presenting quad Gigabit, dual 10GBase-T and a pair of USB 3 ports. Expansion potential looks good, too; the two high-performance Infiniband ports can each be used to attach a 12-bay RX1217/RP disk shelf, pushing the drive count to 40.

Two spare PCI-Express slots are up for grabs and support Synology's own 10GbE and 25GbE adapters, along with a few industry standard Intel and Emulex models. The appliance doesn't have any embedded M.2 slots on its motherboard but you can add Synology's E10M20-T1 10GbE/dual NVMe SSD combo card or the E2D20 dual NVMe SSD card.

Synology RackStation RS4021xs+ review: Software features

With Synology's feature-rich DSM software at the helm, the RS4021xs+ can tackle just about any network storage related task you set it. The Virtual Machine Manager app can run any OS you care to name, including virtualized versions of DSM with the price including one extra license for the latter.

Security monitoring is on its agenda as well, and the slick Surveillance Station app transforms the appliance into a sophisticated recording vault, with support for over 7,600 IP camera models and a huge range of video management services. Collaboration between remote workers is also facilitated by the Office app suite, which is offered as a free alternative to Microsoft 365 and provides a central location for users to create and securely share documents.

Unsurprisingly, you're spoilt for choice with backup services. DSM protects on-appliance data with scheduled snapshots and remote replication while the Hyper Backup app manages all local, remote, Rsync, cloud and iSCSI LUN backups from a single console. Servers and workstations (along with VMware and Hyper-V virtualization hosts) are looked after by the free Active Backup for Business (ABB) app which applies deduplication to its backup vault for big storage savings. ABB is part of the Active Backup Suite, which also provides separate apps for securing Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.

Synology RackStation RS4021xs+ review: 10GbE performance

For testing, we configured four 8TB HAT5300 disks in a RAID5 array and called up the lab's Dell EMC PowerEdge T640 Xeon Scalable tower running Windows Server 2019 for host duties. NAS performance is impressive, with a share mapped to the server over 10GbE delivering Iometer raw sequential read and write speeds both of 9.3Gbits/sec.

Real world performance was equally good; copies of a 25GB test file delivered average read and write rates of 5.3Gbits/sec and 5.1Gbits/sec, while our backup test secured a 22.4GB test folder and 10,500 small files at 2.6Gbits/sec. The Xeon's encryption engine is very efficient too, and copying the 25GB test file to an encrypted folder averaged a speedy 2.7Gbits/sec.

IP SAN performance won't disappoint either, with one 10GbE link to a 1TB target returning Iometer read and write speeds both of 9.3Gbits/sec. To push the appliance harder, we fitted a Synology dual-port 10GbE adapter in the appliance, configured a quad 10GbE MPIO to the target and saw Iometer report high read and write rates of 36.6Gbits/sec and 17.7Gbits/sec.

Synology RackStation RS4021xs+ review: Verdict

With nothing more than a name change and a doubling in memory, there isn't anything here to tempt existing RS4017xs+ users to upgrade. That said, the RS4021xs+ is a tempting proposition for SMBs and larger businesses that want an affordable high-capacity rack NAS offering top 10GbE performance, a remarkable range of storage apps and a generous 5-year warranty.

Synology RackStation RS4021xs+ specifications

The times they are a-changin’: Synology’s RackStation RS1221+ is the company’s first rack NAS appliance to be built around an AMD CPU. Positioned as a replacement for the venerable RS1219+, it swaps the pensionable Atom C2538 CPU and DDR3 memory of its predecessor for a quad-core 2.2GHz Ryzen V1500B, paired with 4GB of faster DDR4 RAM.

What hasn’t changed is the design. Just like the older model, the RS1221+ comes in a space-saving short-depth chassis, allowing it to slot neatly into a small wall box or a two-post rack cabinet. The standard single-PSU model measures 307mm deep, while the RS1221RP+ model we tested is 10cm deeper to accommodate dual 350W hotplug PSUs.

Both versions offer eight hot-swap SATA drive bays, with an eSATA port at the rear for expansion using Synology’s equally short four-bay RX418 disk shelf. Next to it sit four Gigabit Ethernet ports, plus an empty PCIe slot sitting ready for a 10GbE card. If you want to make use of this, check the compatibility list before buying: the appliance refused to boot with a Broadcom card fitted and would only work with an Intel model.

With our 10GbE card in place, we set out to test performance using an SHR array formed of four 10TB Seagate IronWolf NAS drives. From a Dell T640 Xeon Scalable server running Windows Server 2019, Iometer reported sequential read and write speeds of 9.3Gbits/sec and 6.2Gbits/sec – a major step up from the RS1219+, which had only managed 7.9Gbits/sec and 3.2Gbits/sec over a 10GbE connection.

We saw big improvements in real-world operations, too. Our 25GB file copied from and to the server at average speeds of 5.1Gbits/sec and 4.9Gbits/sec – increases of 8% and 55% over the older model. Our backup test was 17% faster, while copies to an encrypted folder more than doubled in performance to 2.7Gbits/sec.

As usual with Synology, the RS1221RP+ enjoys a superb range of storage features courtesy of the slick DSM 6.2 software. Data protection couldn’t be easier, with the Snapshot Replication app providing on-demand and scheduled snapshots of Btrfs volumes, plus replication to remote Synology appliances.

Local and remote backup tasks, meanwhile, are deftly handled by the Hyper Backup app, with Active Backup for Business (ABB) handling Windows and Linux workstations, servers and VMware and Hyper-V hosts; the latest beta of ABB 2.2 adds support for vSphere 7 too.

As for virtualisation, just about any OS can be hosted on the NAS, even virtualised instances of DSM. We had Windows Server 2019 running from an ISO file in 20 minutes, and fully protected by scheduled VM snapshots. Just remember that if you want to use this appliance for any sort of serious virtualisation duties, you’ll almost certainly need to upgrade the RAM beyond the base provision of 4GB.

Other apps worth mentioning include the Drive app, which provides private cloud backup facilities, and the Storage Analyser, which helps you keep an eye on capacity by running reports showing usage for NAS shares, duplicate files and file types. The Security Advisor similarly helps keep your appliance safe by scanning it regularly for malware, and flagging up security issues such as open ports or weak passwords.

We’ve only one complaint about the RS1221RP+: its twin PSU fans are very noisy. We measured an irritating 58.7dB from one metre in front of the appliance, so it’s not great for a desktop role in a small office.

But as long as you’ve a suitable place to put it, the RS1221RP+ offers a great rack storage solution in a small package. The Ryzen CPU delivers a big performance boost over the old Intel architecture, and Synology’s DSM software is brimming with slick and genuinely useful features.

Synology RackStation RS1221RP+ specifications

Stepping up as the direct replacement to Synology’s six-bay DS1618+ desktop NAS appliance, the DS1621+ offers a number of interesting improvements over its predecessor. The big news is Intel getting the elbow, as the DS1621+ is one of a range of new Plus Series appliances from Synology that are powered by a quad-core 2.2GHz AMD Ryzen V1500B CPU.

The main benefit AMD brings to this appliance is performance; Synology claims it’s up to 76% faster than the DS1618+ for sequential read operations. This is no idle claim, either - our lab performance tests came back with some very respectable numbers.

The other major update is the pair of embedded M.2 NVMe SSD slots located in the side panel. With the DS1618+, you had to use one of Synology’s add-in cards if you wanted SSD caching and this welcome feature frees up the PCI-E slot for network upgrades.

It’s also a much more affordable alternative to Synology’s Intel Xeon-powered 6-bay DS1621xs+. This desktop speed demon comes with embedded 10GBase-T and delivered a stunning performance when we tested it, but you pay a hefty premium for the privilege as it costs nearly twice as much.

Synology DiskStation DS1621+ review: Build quality and features

The DS1621+ uses the same sturdy charcoal-black steel box as its predecessor, which employs a pair of 9.2cm diameter rear fans for all cooling. It’s very quiet; we measured sound levels of only 39dB from one metre in front, making this appliance a great choice for small offices that value tranquillity.

Memory starts at 4GB of server-grade ECC memory, which can be easily upgraded to 32GB since the two SO-DIMM slots are located behind a removable hatch in the base. Port permutations haven’t changed: you still get quads of Gigabit and USB 3 ports, while the dual eSATA ports team up with Synology’s DX517 five-bay expansion units to push the drive count to 16.

For performance testing, we installed four of Toshiba’s new air-filled 4TB MG08-D series of hard disks. These are aimed specifically at business users that are more focused on cost and reliability, and don’t need the massive capacities of helium-filled spinners. To test caching efficacy, we fitted two 480GB Kingston DC1000B enterprise-class M.2 NVMe SSDs and although neither these nor the Toshiba drives feature on Synology’s compatibility list, the DSM software allowed us to use them.

More caution is needed when selecting a 10GbE adapter, however, as Synology is rapidly shrinking its third-party hardware compatibility list and focusing more on its own solutions. When we installed the same Emulex dual-port 10GbE adapter we’d used to test the DS1618+, the DS1621+ hung during the boot phase and would only accept a dual-port Intel X520 10GbE adapter.

Synology DiskStation DS1621+ review: 10GbE performance

With a share mapped over 10GbE to a Dell T640 Xeon Scalable host running Windows Server 2019, we watched Iometer report excellent sequential read and write rates of 9.2Gbits/sec and 8.4Gbits/sec. The DS1618+ returned the same read speed but a significantly lower write rate of only 4.3Gbits/sec.

The DS1621+ handled our real world tests better. Copies of a 25GB file delivered slightly faster read and write rates of 4.8Gbits/sec and 4Gbits/sec, while our backup test averaged 2.4Gbits/sec – the DS1618+ mustered 2.3Gbits/sec. The AMD CPU beat the Atom hands-down for encryption performance as copying our 25GB test file to an encrypted NAS folder averaged 2.4Gbits/sec – a 62% improvement over the DS1618+.

IP SAN 10GbE performance revealed more improvements, with a 500GB iSCSI target presented by the DS1621+ returning Iometer sequential read and write rates of 9.2Gbits/sec and 8.3Gbits/sec. That represents respective improvements of 27% and 40% over the DS1618+. The differences became even more marked when using a dual 10GbE MPIO link to the iSCSI target, with the DS1621+ returning read and write speeds of 18.4Gbits/sec and 8.1Gbits/sec. The DS1618+, meanwhile, only managed 11.8Gbits/sec and 5.5Gbits/sec.

If you plan on using NVMe SSDs, note that they can only be used as a cache and not as a separate storage pool, and will only provide any significant improvements to random operations. Using the 10GbE MPIO link to the iSCSI target and Iometer set to 4K blocks, we recorded random read and write rates of 72,500 IOPS and 3,350 IOPS without caching and with a mirrored cache assigned to the storage pool, watched these numbers increase to 75,200 IOPS and 43,500 IOPS.

Synology DiskStation DS1621+ review: The best DSM features

Look no further for data protection features, as Synology’s DSM 6.2 software is chock full of apps and utilities. The Snapshot Replication app handles manual and scheduled snapshots of NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs on Btrfs-formatted volumes while Hyper Backup manages all local, remote, Rsync, cloud and iSCSI LUN backups from a single console.

The free Active Backup Suite is Synology’s star player as it includes Active Backup for Business (ABB) for protecting data on Windows workstations and servers plus VMware and Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs), another app for Microsoft 365 and a third for Google Workspace. Private backup clouds are on the agenda too, as the Drive app provides Dropbox-like synchronization services for collaboration and file sharing.

Synology’s productivity apps include the Office suite which is offered as a free alternative to Microsoft 365. It works with the Drive app to provide a central location for users to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations, collaborate on them together with others and keep them secure.

You’ll need to upgrade the memory but the Virtual Machine Manager increases the appliance’s versatility as it can host VMs running just about any OS you choose plus extra instances of DSM. And then there’s Synology’s class-leading Surveillance Station which supports over 7,600 IP camera models and offers a remarkable range of video recording and management services.

Synology DiskStation DS1621+ review: Verdict

The DS1621+ is a good choice for SOHOs and SMBs that want more capacity than a four-bay NAS appliance can offer but have a keen eye on costs. Value looks good, too - it’s around £100 cheaper than its eight-bay DS1821+ stablemate, the AMD CPU delivers a substantial boost in performance over the older Atom-powered DS1618+ and Synology’s DSM software provides a superb range of apps and utilities.

Synology DiskStation DS1621+ specifications

Synology’s DiskStation DS1621xs+ targets businesses and remote workers that want plenty of NAS power in a compact desktop form factor. This 6-bay appliance is Synology’s first Intel-powered model to sport an embedded 10GBase-T port and it sweetens the deal further with dual M.2 NVMe SSD slots, support for fast DDR4 memory and a spare PCI-E expansion slot.

Costing £1,352 for a diskless model, the DS1621xs+ is a little on the expensive side for a 6-bay NAS, but on the other hand, you’re getting plenty of power for your money. It has a decent 2.2GHz quad-core Intel Xeon D-1527 CPU in the driving seat, partnered by 8GB of DDR4 memory upgradeable to a maximum of 32GB.

Peace of mind is another bonus, thanks to Synology’s generous 5-year limited hardware warranty. In contrast, most other NAS vendors in this market sector only offer standard 2 or 3 year warranties with paid-for options to upgrade them to 5 years.

Synology DiskStation DS1621xs+ review: Build quality and features

In keeping with Synology’s two-year refresh cycle, the DS1621xs+ is the replacement for the DS1618+ and employs the same sturdy charcoal-black steel chassis. The plastic tool-free drive carriers are spring-loaded and can be locked with the key provided in the accessory box to stop them accidentally popping out.

A peek round the back shows a few changes, however. Firstly, the quad Gigabit ports of its predecessor have been replaced with dual Gigabit and a 10GBase-T port. You get three USB 3 ports while the pair of eSATA ports can be used to expand outside the box with Synology’s optional 5-bay DX517 desktop expansion units – hence the ‘16’ in the model name.

Memory starts at 8GB and is a cinch to upgrade via two SO-DIMM slots lurking behind a removable hatch underneath the chassis. The M.2 NVMe SSD slots are easily reached by removing the drive carriers to access them in the side panel and for cache testing we fitted two 480GB Kingston DC1000B enterprise-class NVMe SSDs. A detail worth mentioning is that unlike Qnap’s appliances, you can’t use SSDs to create a high-performance storage pool.

The PCI-E slot at the rear is accessed by removing the lid and for our heavy-duty performance tests, we fitted an Emulex dual-port 10GBase-T network card. The appliance uses a pair of 9cm diameter cooling fans protected behind metal grills and small offices will approve of their low noise levels, which we measured at only 39dB from one metre in front.

Synology DiskStation DS1621xs+ review: DSM features

Synology is promoting the DS1621xs+ as its ultimate backup solution, and it’s hard to argue with; its DSM 6.2 software is brimming with data protection apps. The Snapshot Replication app, for instance, handles manual and scheduled snapshots of NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs on Btrfs volumes, which can also be replicated to remote Synology appliances.

Hyper Backup, meanwhile, handles local, remote, Rsync, cloud and iSCSI LUN backups from a single console and the Drive app allows you to create your own private backup cloud with Dropbox-like synchronization services for collaboration and file sharing. The star player, though, is Synology’s Active Backup for Business app which provides a complete on-appliance solution for protecting Windows servers and workstations along with Hyper-V, VMware vCentre and ESXi hypervisors.

Another valuable app (particularly in these challenging times) is the Security Advisor, which scans the appliance at regular intervals for malware and security weaknesses and reports on its finding. The Storage Analyzer app keeps your finger on the pulse for storage usage by running scheduled reports to show NAS share utilisation, duplicate files and file types.

The DS1621xs+ even has the memory capacity to handle virtualization duties and DSM’s Virtual Machine Manager allows the appliance to host VMs running just about any OS you want, as well as supporting extra instances of DSM. It offers protection plans to backup selected VMs using snapshots and it can link up with the ABB app to provide disaster recovery services for bare-metal system and VM backups.

Synology DiskStation DS1621xs+ review: Performance testing

To test 10GbE performance, we fitted a quartet of 14TB Western Digital Red Plus drives and created a large RAID5 storage pool from the DSM’s Storage Manager. Our test host was a Dell EMC PowerEdge T640 tower server equipped with dual Xeon Gold 5120 CPUs, 64GB of DDR4 plus quad 10GBase-T ports and running Windows Server 2019.

To test maximum performance, we turned to IP SANs where we created a 1TB target and linked the server to it over a triple 10GbE MPIO link. The DS1621xs+ delivered some staggering results with Iometer reporting sequential read and write speeds both of 26.7Gbits/sec and I/O rates with 4KB blocks of 173,000 IOPS and 112,000 IOPS.

For random read and write operations, Iometer recorded 26.7Gbits/sec and 0.74Gbits/sec while I/O throughput was measured at 173,000 IOPS and 3,700 IOPS. Using the Kingston NVMe SSDs as a mirrored read/write cache, we saw random write speed increase nicely to 4Gbits/sec while I/O throughput was boosted hugely to 55,000 IOPS.

The DS1621xs+ is no slouch in the NAS department either: a share mapped to the server over 10GbE returned excellent Iometer sequential read and write speeds of 9.3Gbits/sec and 9.2Gbits/sec. Real-world performance was up there too, and our 25GB file copies averaged 4.5Gbits/sec while our backup test secured a 22.4GB folder and 10,500 files to the share at 2.6Gbits/sec.

Synology DiskStation DS1621xs+ review: Verdict

There’s no doubt about it – the DS1621xs+ is one of the fastest SMB desktop NAS appliances we’ve seen. You’ll be paying a premium for the privilege, since it’s comparatively pricey for a 6-bay NAS, but it clearly has the horsepower to handle the demands of 10GbE connections.

Expansion potential is particularly good - you have the spare PCI-E slot plus support for up to 32GB of memory, and we’ve shown that M.2 NVMe SSD caches will make substantial improvements to random write operations. Last but not least is Synology’s DSM software which delivers a wealth of features and a sharp focus on data protection, making this the undisputed king of desktop storage appliances.

Synology DiskStation DS1621xs+ specifications

The SA3600 heads up Synology’s family of high-end NAS appliances, targeting businesses that want powerful features and plenty of expansion potential. It’s a 2U 12-bay rack mounter that supports SAS 3 as well as SATA drives, and it comes with a meaty 12-core 2.1GHz Xeon D-1567 CPU in the engine room.

This appliance is designed to grow with your workload. The base 16GB of DDR4 memory can be boosted to 128GB using standard DIMM modules, and an external SAS 3 expansion port supports up to seven RX1217sas or RX2417sas expansion shelves, taking the drive count to a maximum of 180.

You won’t run short of network bandwidth either, thanks to four embedded Gigabit Ethernet ports, plus two 10GBase-T ports. A pair of spare PCIe slots permits further expansion, with plenty of industry-standard 10GbE and 25GbE cards on the official compatibility list.

It’s all crowned by Synology’s excellent DSM software, which is crammed with high-quality business apps. The range of backup tools in particular is unbeatable, covering Btrfs snapshots, Hyper Backup for local, remote, rsync, cloud and iSCSI LUN backups, plus the Drive sync app for collaboration and file sharing. Synology’s free Active Backup suite is included too, providing a complete set of apps for securing servers, desktops, numerous types of virtual machine and G Suite and Microsoft 365 data.

Synology’s class-leading Surveillance Station app deserves a mention too. It supports over 7,400 IP camera models, with outstanding recording features, and can even receive live video feeds from iOS and Android devices. It’s a great addition, especially since the SA3600’s high capacity makes it ideal as a CCTV recording vault.

While this is all good stuff, it will seem eerily familiar to anyone au fait with Synology’s existing product lineup: the specification is all but identical to that of the older SA3400, which supports the same number of drives and runs the same DSM software. The only significant differences are the CPU – the SA3400 uses an eight-core 2.1GHz Xeon D-1541, rather than the 12-core model of the SA3600 – and the price, which is around £1,700 less.

Clearly, the question is whether the SA3600’s extra performance justifies that huge price premium. To find out, we configured four 16TB Seagate IronWolf NAS drives as a RAID5 array, and hooked the SA3600 up to a Dell PowerEdge T640 Xeon Scalable tower running Windows Server 2019. With a share mapped to the server, we recorded sequential read and write rates both of 9.3Gbits/sec – identical to the SA3400. We did see improvements when copying our 25GB test file to an encrypted NAS folder, but these were slight: the SA3600 was 5.4% faster and CPU usage was 2% lower.

For IP SAN testing, we added an extra dual-port 10GBase-T card to the appliance and created a quad 10GbE MPIO link on the server to a 500GB iSCSI target. This gave us sequential read and write speeds of 36.4Gbits/sec and 18.1Gbits/sec – again, a negligible performance improvement of barely 1% over the SA3400. However, CPU load settled at around 11% during writes, versus 19% on the SA3400, showing the benefit of the extra cores.

The additional silicon also makes the SA3600 a better bet than the SA3400 for virtualisation duties, and it’s effortless to set up within DSM: we had Windows Server 2019 up and running in a virtual machine in only ten minutes. The app dashboard provides quick access to all VMs, while the vSwitch service isolates them on specific network ports and protection plans can take regular snapshots.

The SA3600 is undoubtedly a great choice for heavy storage workloads and large virtualisation projects. If your requirements are more modest, however, consider the SA3400: it’s a lot cheaper, and only marginally slower.

Synology SA3600 specifications

If you’re looking for a NAS that can handle more than just everyday storage duties, the RS1619xs+ could be just the thing. It’s Synology’s flagship 1U rack NAS appliance, and inside its modestly-sized chassis it features a quad-core 2.2GHz Intel Xeon D-1527 CPU, along with 8GB of server-grade DDR4 ECC memory (upgradable to a maximum of 64GB). It sports a pair of internal M.2 slots too, which will accept both NVMe and SATA SSDs for caching duties.

Connections are also well covered: although the four built-in Ethernet ports are only of the Gigabit type, the PCIe slot can support a wide range of industry-standard adapters, so you’ll have no problem moving up to 10GbE. And while there are only four internal drive bays, a high-speed InfiniBand port lets you add Synology’s 12-bay RX1217 disk shelf – or the RX1217RP, with its redundant power supply.

As for data protection, Synology’s DSM 6.2 software is loaded with useful features. It supports both manual and scheduled NAS and IP SAN snapshots on Btrfs volumes, and offers fast recovery services that allow you to browse NAS snapshots from the File Station app and restore individual files and folders.

Meanwhile, the Hyper Backup app manages all your local, remote, rsync and iSCSI LUN backups from a single console. It supports cloud destinations too, with native support for a dozen providers, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Drive, Dropbox and Google Drive – and it also integrates with Synology’s own C2 Backup cloud service for off-site storage.

Next up is Synology’s Drive app, which replaces the older Cloud Station Server app and provides a range of Dropbox-like sync services for private file sharing and collaboration. All management is carried out from the separate Drive Admin Console app, and Windows, Android and iOS users can all download the Drive agent or app to take advantage of two-way folder syncing.

One of the best parts of Synology’s offering is its Active Backup for Business (ABB) app. Like the other apps, this is included free with the purchase of the appliance, and offers a superb range of backup, restore and disaster recovery tools for servers and workstations. Virtual environments are supported too, with agentless backup for VMware vCenter and ESXi hypervisors, and protection for Hyper-V virtual machines created on Windows Server 2016/2019 hosts.

If VMs are your thing, you can also use the RS1619xs+ itself as a virtualisation platform: the bundled Virtual Machine Manager app allows the NAS to host VMs running any OS you choose, and the Xeon processor means there’s a decent chunk of power on hand. We tried creating a Windows Server 2019 VM from an ISO file and had it up and running smoothly in ten minutes flat.

To back up your VMs, you can set a snapshot schedule and set a retention policy for a specific recovery point objective (RPO). For disaster recovery it’s also possible to mount backups created by ABB as virtual machines, enabling you to revisit a specific system as it was at a previous point in time, even if the original hardware has since given up the ghost.

The final piece of the puzzle is performance. To test this we installed four 16TB Seagate IronWolf NAS drives as a RAID5 array, fitted an Emulex dual-port 10GbE adapter and connected to the appliance from an HPE ProLiant DL180 Gen10 Xeon Scalable rack server running Windows Server 2019. Results were rock-solid, with Iometer recording raw sequential read and write rates of 9.2Gbits/sec and 9.1Gbits/sec. Real-world file copy speeds were very good too, with drag-and-drop copies of our 25GB test file completing at sustained read and write rates of 5.4Gbits/sec and 5.3Gbits/sec. Our 22.4GB folder of 10,500 small files was backed up speedily too, at a very respectable 2.6Gbits/sec.

Those results make the RS1619xs+ one of the best-performing 1U rack NAS appliances around, and it offers a superb range of storage and data-protection features. The icing on the cake is Synology’s generous five-year warranty, which ensures you can buy with confidence.

Synology RackStation RS1619xs+ specifications

Synology’s SA3200D aims to deliver fault-tolerant network storage services at a price that will appeal to SMBs. The company has recently shown an increased interest in high availability solutions and the SA3200D follows closely on the heels of the IT Pro-approved UC3200 appliance.

Physically, there’s nothing to tell them apart as both employ the same 2U 12-bay rack chassis with dual controllers and support for SATA/SAS3 HDDs and SSDs. However, whereas the UC3200 runs its controllers in active/active mode for transparent failover, the SA3200D spins them up as an active/passive cluster so failover will interrupt all storage services.

The UC3200 costs around £1,300 less and the reason is it only provides IP SAN services along with LUN snapshots and replication. The SA3200D delivers the full NAS and IP SAN storage works, and can run every feature, app and service available in Synology’s DSM software.

Synology SA3200D review: Controllers and failover features

The SA3200D uses exactly the same controllers as the UC3200. Each is powered by a quad-core 2.4GHz Intel Xeon D-1521 CPU, teamed up with 8GB of DDR4 ECC memory that can be boosted to 64GB.

Data ports comprise dual Gigabit and one 10GBase-T which can be increased further. Each controller has a spare PCI-E slot, while their SAS3 ports can be used to daisy-chain a maximum of two 12-bay RXD1219sas disk shelves. The controllers are each cooled by dual on-board cold-swap fans and come in for the same criticism as the UC3200; even on the DSM ‘quiet’ mode, they’re as noisy as a small vacuum cleaner.

The appliance uses the standard Synology High Availability (SHA) app to provide failover services. This is freely available for all Synology business-class appliances and allows you to create a high availability cluster across two identical models using their network ports for cluster and heartbeat connections.

This method is also used by Synology’s 5-year old RC18015xs+ solution but the SA3200D is far superior as it’s a self-contained unit and is substantially better value. Another key advantage is its controllers are linked internally over an NTB (non-transparent bridge) connection so failover will be a lot faster as all heartbeat and cluster connections are implemented in hardware.

Synology SA3200D review: Deployment and data protection

Deployment is no different to Synology’s standard NAS appliances - we used the Web Assistant to discover the appliance and load the DSM software on both controllers. For testing, we fitted 6TB Toshiba Enterprise SAS3 HDDs and 400GB Seagate Nytro SAS3 SSDs and used the Storage Manager app to create a RAID5 array with a mirrored SSD read/write cache assigned.

Along with a wealth of NAS and IP SAN services, Synology’s DSM software is positively brimming with data protection features. The Hyper Backup app manages local, remote, Rsync, cloud and iSCSI LUN backups while the Drive app provides Dropbox-like sync services for Windows workstations plus iOS and Android mobiles.

The Snapshot Replication app supports manual and scheduled NAS and IP SAN snapshots on BTRFS volumes and offers fast recovery services. LUN snapshots can also be managed from the iSCSI Manager app and data recovery is a cinch as you choose a snapshot, clone it or copy it in place.

Synology’s Active Backup for Business (ABB) app is a class act,providing backup, restore and disaster recovery services for Windows servers and workstations along with agentless backup for VMware vCentre and ESXi hypervisors plus Windows Server 2016/2019 Hyper-V hosts. Managed from a single console, ABB provides backup scheduling along with slick file and folder plus bare-metal system restore facilities.

Synology SA3200D review: Failover testing

For failover testing, we called up a Dell PowerEdge T640 Xeon Scalable tower server running Windows Server 2019 and hooked up to the SA3200D over 10GbE. We set up a continuous Ping on the appliance’s data port and also created an ABB job to secure the entire server.

From the SHA app, we initiated a switchover from the active controller A to the passive controller B. As soon as the app set this in motion, we saw the ABB backup job stop and post a log entry saying it had been cancelled.

Iometer lost contact with the appliance five seconds later and it was a further 42 seconds before contact was re-established and all services had been switched over. As we demonstrated, the active/passive will cause all jobs using the appliance to fail but the process is as fast as Synology claims.

It does require manual intervention, but we were able to restart the ABB backup job which continued to completion. Failover is also a lot faster than the RC18015xs+ as when we tested it way back in 2015, we found it took 90 seconds to restore all services.

Synology SA3200D review: Storage performance

With a share mapped to the Dell T640 test server, we found overall 10GbE performance to be very good with Iometer reporting raw sequential read and write speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 8.1Gbits/sec. It was the same story for our real world tests as drag and drop copies of a 25GB test file returned average read and write rates of 5Gbits/sec and 4.6Gbits/sec.

Our backup test was handled well with a 22.4GB folder holding 10,500 small files secured to the share at a speedy 2.1Gbits/sec. The SA3200D has no problem handling encryption as copying the 25GB test file to an encrypted folder averaged 2.2Gbits/sec.

IP SAN performance is equally good with a 500GB iSCSI target returning Iometer read and write rates of 9.1Gbits/sec and 8.1Gbits/sec. After fitting Emulex dual-port 10GBase-T cards in the controllers, we created a dual 10GbE MPIO link to the target and saw speeds increase to 18.1Gbits/sec and 10.4Gbits/sec.

Synology SA3200D review: Verdict

The SA3200D delivers highly available NAS and IP SAN storage in a self-contained appliance at an affordable price. Storage services will be stopped briefly during failover, but our tests show the switchover from active to passive controllers is fast and the appliance is capable of running everything Synology’s DSM software has to offer.

Synology SA3200D specifications

Synology’s first move into highly available storage was a hit and miss affair; its RC18015xs+ rack solution was expensive and only provided basic active/passive protection which resulted in service interruptions during failover. The UC3200 is a completely different beast altogether, providing an active/active architecture for transparent failover at less than half the price of its predecessor and, indeed, most of the competition.

Whereas the RC18015xs+ requires two diskless head units and at least one RXD1215sas expansion disk shelf, the UC3200 is a self-contained array. This 2U rack unit comes complete with dual controllers and twelve SAS3 LFF/SFF drive bays.

The controllers are linked internally over an NTB (non-transparent bridge) connection and perform fast memory syncing. The drive bays are connected to a shared backplane and support a wide range of enterprise-class SAS3 HDDs and SSDs.

One noteworthy point is the UC3200 is specifically designed to provide IP SAN services only. The RC18015xs+ and Synology’s new active/passive SA3200D both support NAS and IP SAN services.

Synology UC3200 review: Controller features

The controllers are powered by quad-core 2.4GHz Intel Xeon D-1521 CPUs with the base units coming with 8GB of DDR4 ECC memory. The controller canisters are easily removed from the rear and after flipping off the clip-on metal cover, you can access the four DIMM slots and upgrade memory to a maximum of 64GB.

Each controller has dual Gigabit and one 10GBase-T data ports and their spare PCI-E slot supports a modest range of certified Synology, Intel and Marvell 10GbE or 25GbE adapter cards. Two on-board cold-swap fan modules provide dedicated controller cooling which, although it won’t be an issue in a server room, emit noise levels of a par with a small vacuum cleaner even on the ‘quiet’ fan mode.

Storage expansion potential isn’t as high as the RC18105xs+, which supports up to fifteen 12-bay RXD1215sas disk shelves. The UC3200 controllers each have a SAS3 port which can be used to daisy-chain up to two 12-bay RXD1219sas disk shelves for a total of 36 drives.

Synology UC3200 review: Deployment and HAM

Deployment is no different to any other Synology appliance; we just ran the Web Assistant to discover the UC3200 and loaded the latest DSM UC software. The main web console is a sparse affair, with a total of eight apps on offer, including the Control Panel, High Availability Manager (HAM), Storage Manager, iSCSI Manager, Snapshot Replication and Log Center.

For testing, we loaded up eight 6TB Toshiba Enterprise SAS3 HDDs and four 400GB Seagate Nytro SAS3 SSDs. Using the Storage Manager, we created two RAID10 pools and assigned a RAID1 SSD read/write cache to each one.

When creating pools, you choose the primary controller that will manage them. The UC3200 employs ALUA (asymmetric logical unit access) so an MPIO link across both controllers won’t double performance, since only the primary link is optimized while the secondary link is non-optimized and reserved for failover.

All the action can be monitored from the HAM app, which provides an animated status overview graphic for the failover link. It also offers plenty of utilization graphs for the controller’s CPU, memory, network and storage.

Synology UC3200 review: Performance

To test performance, we used an HPE ProLiant DL180 Gen10 rack server equipped with dual 16-core Xeon Scalable Platinum 8153 CPUs, 64GB of DDR4, an Emulex dual-port 10GbE card and Windows Server 2019.

With a 10GbE MPIO link across both controllers to a 1TB iSCSI LUN, we saw Iometer report 9.2Gbits/sec and 7Gbits/sec for sequential reads and writes. Swapping to random operations returned a 9.2Gbits/sec read rate but only 3.5Gbits/sec for writes.

It was the same story for I/O throughput, as dropping the Iometer block size to 4KB returned sequential read and write rates of 123,000 and 81,000 IOPS. Random operations delivered read and write rates of 109,000 and 31,000 IOPS.

It’s worth playing with the appliance’s iSCSI settings to get the best performance. The system defaults to an I/O queue depth of 16 but our test results were achieved with this pushed to the 128 maximum.

Synology UC3200 review: Snapshots and failover

Snapshot support requires volumes to be formatted as BTRFS and thin-provisioned iSCSI LUNs to be created so their advanced features become available. You can use either the iSCSI Manager app to schedule snapshots as often as every five minutes or run them from the Snapshot Replication app, which also provides facilities for replicating them to remote Synology appliances.

To use failover, selected network port pairs are designated for these duties from the Control Panel app, and each pair must be in the same subnet and have the same MTU. To test failover, we started an Iometer session on our ProLiant test server and used the DSM UC console to shut down the primary controller A which was managing the volume.

There was no drama - the UC3200 seamlessly switched all operations to Controller B, where our Iometer test continued unabated and access to the web console was returned after logging back in. If the controller has failed, you can replace it without powering the system down and when it’s back in place, just quickly press the power button on the front panel to turn it back on.

We did this with Controller A and once back up, the HAM app spotted it and swapped all operations back over to it. All throughout these tests, we never lost access to the LUN and our Iometer test was blissfully unaware that failover and recovery had occurred.

Synology UC3200 review: Verdict

Apart from the sluggish random write performance, there’s little else to fault the UC3200 on. It’s easy to deploy, provides solid IP SAN plus snapshot services and above all else, delivers seamless controller failover at a remarkably good price.

Synology UC3200 specifications

Synology’s four-bay RackStation RS820+ NAS is a significant upgrade on its predecessor, the RS818+. That model, introduced two years ago, was held back by an ageing Atom C2538 CPU and relatively slow DDR3L memory; the RS820+ sports a more powerful quad-core 2.1GHz Atom C3538 and faster DDR4 RAM. The RS820RP+ model we tested also adds power redundancy courtesy of dual 150W hotplug power supplies.

Interestingly, the new appliance has also gained 2GB of base memory embedded onto the motherboard. That means its single SODIMM slot can be used to boost capacity to a total of 18GB, a modest step up from the 16GB on the older model. Upgrades are easy: you simply need to undo the four screws holding the lid down to gain immediate access to the memory slots.

The appliance has a spare PCIe slot too, which will accept a good range of 10GbE network adapters – or you can fit Synology’s M2D18 dual-slot M.2 SATA/NVMe SSD card to provide a high-performance cache.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the standard port count. You still get four embedded Gigabit Ethernet and dual USB 3 sockets, along with a single rear eSATA port, which can be used to double the drive count by connecting Synology’s four-bay RX418 disk shelf.

Deploying the RS820RP+ proved simple, as Synology’s discovery web portal quickly found the appliance on the lab network, initialised it and loaded the latest DSM 6.2 software. We then installed three 14TB Seagate IronWolf NAS drives and used the DSM Storage Manager app to create a 24TB storage pool. We used Synology’s versatile SHR format for this, but you can also create standard RAID5 or 6 arrays if you wish.

For performance testing, we installed an Emulex 10GBase-T card in the appliance and mapped a share to a Dell T640 Xeon Scalable tower server running Windows Server 2019. In this configuration, Iometer recorded raw read and write NAS speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 4.1Gbits/sec – a notable step up from the old RS818+, which managed 7.9Gbits/sec and 3.2Gbits/sec in the same tests.

The gap was smaller in real-world scenarios, however. Drag-and-drop copies of a 25GB file on the RS820RP+ saw average read and write speeds of 4.8Gbits/sec and 3.3Gbits/sec, which was barely ahead of the RS818+’s 4.6Gbits/sec and 3.1Gbits/sec. And our backup test, using a 22.4GB folder containing 10,500 small files, completed at exactly the same 1.9Gbits/sec on both devices.

The RS820RP+ did pull ahead with encrypted shares. Here our 25GB test file was written at 1.5Gbits/sec – 0.4Gbits/sec faster than the RS818+. And its strongest suit is IP SAN performance: using a 500GB target, we attained read and write speeds of 9.1Gbits/sec and 5.2Gbits/sec, a clear cut above the RS818+’s 6.1Gbits/sec and 3.5Gbits/sec.

As for software features – well, Synology’s DSM platform won our sister title PC Pro’s Business Software of the Year award in 2019, so it’s safe to say you won’t be disappointed by its capabilities. A wealth of data-protection tools makes the RS820RP+ ideal as a backup vault, with Synology’s classy Active Backup for Business (ABB) app offering full backup, restore and disaster-recovery services for Windows servers and workstations, plus VMware vCenter and ESXi hypervisors. It’s recently been updated for Hyper-V too, and can protect VMs created on Windows Server 2016 and upwards.

We also like the Snapshot Replication app, which supports on-demand and scheduled snapshots of Btrfs volumes with NAS folders and iSCSI LUNs, and can replicate them to remote Synology appliances. Meanwhile, the Hyper Backup app manages local, remote and Rysnc backups, with the Cloud Sync app adding support for plenty of cloud-storage providers.

On the other hand, although the RS820RP+ is an impressive NAS appliance, it’s quite expensive for the hardware spec: Synology’s desktop-format DS1819+ remains our top pick for SMBs, as it offers twice the memory, eight drive bays and 10GbE options for a similar price. But if you’re after a rackmount solution with power redundancy, the RS820RP+ fits the bill admirably and delivers unbeatable data-protection services.

Synology RackStation RS820RP+ specifications

SMBs that have taken a fancy to Synology’s speedy FlashStation FS6400 storage array but flinch at its near ten-grand price tag will find the FS3400 a more appealing alternative. Coming in at a shade over £5K, the FS3400 offers the same 24 SFF drive bays, supports SAS3 plus SATA SFF storage devices and offers an equally good expansion potential.

Whereas the FS6400 sports a tasty pair of 2.1GHz Intel Xeon Scalable Silver 4110 CPUs, the FS3400 is endowed with a far more modest eight-core 2.1GHz D-1541 Xeon CPU. On the plus side, memory is server-grade DDR4 ECC and the FS3400 comes with 16GB which can be upgraded to a very usable 128GB.

The FS3400 offers more choice than its big brother in the network department; along with dual embedded 10GBase-T ports, it also offers quad Gigabit. A big disappointment is that although the FS3400 replaces the FS2017 which was launched early in 2017, it has exactly the same hardware.

The FS6400 is a hugely significant hardware upgrade over the FS3017 but the only difference between the FS2017 and FS3400 is the name label on the front panel. The FS3400 claims a 50% performance boost for random write operations but clearly, this can only be down to improvements to the DSM software and Synology’s use of the latest high-performance SATA SSDs for its tests.

Synology FlashStation FS3400 review: DSM 6.2

Deployment is pleasantly speedy. Synology’s discovery web portal found the appliance on the lab network and downloaded the latest DSM 6.2 software with minimal fuss. Unfortunately, the FS3400 inherits the same noisy cooling system as its predecessor – even with the fans on their lowest speed, we measured noise levels of 62dB from one metre in front.

A storage feature that makes Synology stand out is its proprietary RAID F1 array which is designed to reduce the impact of SSD wear and thus the potential for simultaneous failures. DSM nominates one SSD in the array to receive more parity bits than the rest so it wears out quicker and can be replaced when it reaches the end of its life before triggering multiple drive failures.

Synology has been working on a RAID F2 version which delivers dual SSD resiliency but after two years, this has still yet to materialize - and there’s no indication it’ll make an appearance in DSM 7.0.

If you’re planning on using the FS3400 as a backup vault, you’ll find DSM offers a veritable feast of data protection features. Make sure you choose BTRFS when creating volumes, as this enables NAS and IP SAN snapshots which can be run on demand and scheduled for as often as every five minutes.

Snapshots can be replicated to remote Synology appliances and to local volumes as well, allowing you to hold extra on-site copies for quick restores. Recovery options are excellent as we could restore or clone a share or LUN from the selected snapshot and use the File Station app to browse share snapshots and select individual files and folders.

Synology FlashStation FS3400 review: ABB and virtualization

Another compelling argument for data backup duties is DSM’s slick Active Backup for Business (ABB) app. At no extra cost, this provides full backup, restore and disaster recovery services for Windows servers and workstations plus VMware vCentre and ESXi hypervisors with this latest version adding timely support for Hyper-V hosts.

All managed from one console, ABB is easy to use and just requires agents loaded on your Windows systems where it provides backup scheduling as well as file, folder and bare-metal system restore facilities. It offers agentless application-consistent backups of VMware virtual machines (VMs) and can protect Hyper-V VMs created on hosts running Windows Server 2016 upwards.

Synology’s Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) app allows the FS3400 to host VMs running just about any OS you choose. The app is simple to use and we created a Windows Server 2019 VM on our SSD array, installed it from an ISO file and had it ready for action in 10 minutes.

The VMM dashboard provides quick access to VMs and its vSwitch service can isolate them on selected network ports. Protection plans backup selected VMs using snapshots and they can be cloned and migrated to other Synology appliances running the VMM app, but this will require an optional VMM Pro license.

Synology FlashStation FS3400 review: 10GbE performance

With four enterprise-class 1.92GB Micron 5200 Max SATA SSDs configured in a RAID F1 array, we recorded good overall performance over 10GbE. A NAS share mapped to a Dell T640 Xeon Scalable tower server running Windows Server 2019 returned sequential read and write speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 8.5Gbits/sec.

I/O throughout was also good. Iometer set to 4KB transfer requests reported sequential read and write rates of 106,000 IOPS and 85,000 IOPS. For random operations, we saw read and write rates of 105,500 IOPS and 69,000 IOPS.

IP SAN 10GbE performance was equally impressive, with a 500GB target returning sequential read and write speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 8.7Gbits/sec. Random read and write I/O throughput was measured at 109,000 IOPS and 65,000 IOPS.

We ramped up the pressure by creating a dual 10GbE MPIO link to the test iSCSI target and saw sequential read and write speeds increase nicely to 18.1Gbits/sec and 15.8Gbits/sec. Random throughput was also impressive, with Iometer reporting read and write rates of 190,400 IOPS and 95,500 IOPS.

Synology FlashStation FS3400 review: Verdict

Synology has been a bit cheeky with the FS3400 as apart from its new model name, it’s identical to the two-year-old FS2017. Clearly, there’s absolutely nothing here to tempt existing FS2017 owners to upgrade - but the FS3400 will tick a lot of boxes with SMBs looking for an affordable all-Flash appliance with a good turn of speed, plus great data protection and virtualization features.

Synology FlashStation FS3400 review specifications

There’s something indefinably exciting about getting a new piece of hardware to play with; whether it’s a smartphone or a server, there’s a certain joy in unpacking a new device and getting to grips with its capabilities, seeing how far you can push its limits.

As 2019 draws to a close, we’re taking a look back over the best products of the year. It’s been a strong year in most product categories, with new iterations of some of our favourite ranges. Although this year hasn’t seen the release of any particularly revolutionary products - and we’re discounting foldable phones, as they haven’t been widely released as yet - there have been some strong showings across the board.

Here, then, are our hand-picked awards for the top products of 2019.

Best laptop

WINNER: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme

Lenovo’s monster ThinkPad X1 Extreme is a masterclass in how to create a £2,000-plus laptop that still feels like good value. This sleek machine packs an outstanding touchscreen display, powerful components and the ThinkPad’s reliably excellent keyboard into an attractive and relatively portable chassis, blending serious horsepower with boardroom looks.

As if that wasn’t enough, the X1 Extreme also includes a number of business-friendly features, including security and privacy protections and even eye-tracking features to help boost productivity. It may be expensive, but if you need a do-it-all laptop, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme is tough to beat.

Read our full Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme review.

HIGHLY COMMENDED: HP EliteBook x360 830 G6

While not quite as outstanding as the ThinkPad X1, the HP EliteBook x360 830 G6 is nevertheless an excellent all-rounder that offers all the functionality and polish an enterprise needs. While technically a convertible, it’s as a laptop that the x360 really excels and, despite a few drawbacks, it’s one of the smartest devices we’ve seen this year.

Read our full HP EliteBook x360 830 G6 review.

Best tablet

WINNER: Apple iPad mini 5

Apple has so thoroughly dominated the tablet computing space that for many people, ‘iPad’ is synonymous with the category as a whole, and the iPad mini is one of the most impressive of the lot. The latest edition is the first update to the range in almost four years, but it’s retained all the qualities that made us love the mini in the first place.

It’s more powerful than the MacBook Air, and the arrival of iPadOS’ productivity-boosting features has made it a genuine option for business users. On top of that, it’s also got support for the Apple Pencil - and all of this goodness is packed into a device that can still conceivably fit into a pocket.

Read our full Apple iPad mini 5 review.

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Samsung Galaxy Tab S6

Samsung is one of the few manufacturers still flying the flag for premium tablets, most of the other rivals having since ceded the fight to the iPad. It’s gratifying, then, that the Galaxy Tab S6 is an exemplary Android tablet, including a bundled stylus, great battery life and an impressive desktop-style UI in the form of Samsung DeX.

Read our full Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 review.

Best 2-in-1

WINNER: Microsoft Surface Pro 7

We have our qualms with Microsoft’s latest Surface Pro - the Core i5 model’s performance leaves something to be desired, and the battery life is less than we were hoping for - but despite these drawbacks, the Surface Pro 7 is still the zenith of the 2-in-1 form factor. It’s portable, versatile, and it’s still more than capable of handling everything up to proper media rendering tasks.

The Surface Pro’s design is near-perfect, and it truly comes into its own with the addition of USB-C, allowing you to flit seamlessly from a desk-based monitor, mouse and keyboard setup to on-the-go notetaking with the Surface Pen. Combine that with the smart improvements Microsoft has been making to Windows 10 and you’re got the ideal multi-purpose machine.

Read our full Microsoft Surface Pro 7 review.

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1

The Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 is aimed squarely at business users, but that doesn’t mean it has to be clunky or unattractive. On the contrary, it’s one of the more appealing convertibles we’ve tested this year - albeit in a professional, businesslike sort of way. Aside from the nice design and the smooth hinge action, it’s also a really well-rounded machine, making it perfect for mass deployments.

Read our full Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 review.

Best smartphone

WINNER: Samsung Galaxy Note 10+

The Galaxy S10 may be Samsung’s more mainstream device, but don’t be fooled - the ‘prosumer’ Note 10+ is where the real action’s at. With a screen measuring almost 7in and a weight of just under 200g, it’s a bit of a behemoth, but that size is concealing some of the most powerful components Samsung has ever put into a smartphone.

As with the Tab S6, DeX is a standout feature that really elevates the Note 10+, and for the truly hyper-productive, the S-Pen is still the pinnacle of mobile note-taking. Aside from this barrage of productivity-friendly features, the Note 10+ also has one of the best cameras available on a top-end flagship device.

Read our full Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ review.

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Google Pixel 3a

The Pixel 3a is the poster-child for doing more with less. Despite on paper being a less-sophisticated device than the Pixel 3, it takes all of the things we love about Google’s handsets and - thanks to its lower-powered processor - fixes its biggest issue by improving the battery life. In fact, for our money, it’s still a better bet than its successor, the Pixel 4.

Read our full Google Pixel 3a review.

Best 1U server

WINNER: Dell EMC PowerEdge R340

Dell EMC’s PowerEdge R340 might be among the most affordable of its servers, but don’t mistake it for a budget model; this pint-sized beauty is highly scalable, thanks to its support for up to eight SFF hot-swap bays, 12Gb/sec SAS speeds and a meaty quad-core Xeon E-2134.

The real attraction here, however, is Dell’s superlative iDRAC9 remote management software, which offers an HTML5-based web console for monitoring and administrating your server. The upgraded Enterprise edition allows full OS control and virtual media services, making admin tasks a breeze.

Read our full Dell EMC PowerEdge R340 review.

HIGHLY COMMENDED: HPE ProLiant DL20 Gen10

Big things come in small packages, so the saying goes, and rack servers don’t get much smaller than the 1U HPE ProLiant DL20 Gen10, which is just 41cm deep. Despite its small proportions, it still offers a wealth of storage options and plenty of power, making it an excellent choice for space-conscious organisations - although it’s not quite as scalable as the R340.

Read our full HPE ProLiant DL20 Gen10 review.

Best tower server

WINNER: Fujitsu Server Primergy TX1320 M4

Like HPE’s DL20, the Fujitsu TX1320 M4 is a dinky little machine standing just over 40cm tall, but it’s managed to cram a lot of functionality into its slim frame. Not an inch of space is wasted, and there’s a surprisingly fulsome selection of configurations to choose from, including ten Xeon E-2100 CPUs and up to eight hotplug SFF drive bays.

It’s highly configurable and has great expansion potential, which makes it a great fit for businesses that want a server that can grow along with their needs. It even includes Fujitsu’s free ServerView Suite management tool - although SMBs may be better off sticking to the simpler System Monitor utility instead.

Read our full Fujitsu Server Primergy TX1320 M4 review.

HIGHLY COMMENDED: HPE ProLiant ML30 Gen10

A bit of a beast in comparison to the TX1320, this squat, black monolith is nonetheless a capable alternative for businesses with modest infrastructure needs that don’t want to splash out on a full server cabinet. Like the Fujitsu, it features a Xeon E-2100 and a range of storage options, in addition to a range of storage options - although the fact that storage isn’t included as standard lessens its appeal a little.

Read our full HPE ProLiant ML30 Gen10 review.

Best storage array

WINNER: Lenovo ThinkSystem DE4000F

This appliance is the result of a partnership between Lenovo and NetApp, and it marks the company’s first serious foray into the enterprise storage market. As an entry-level all-Flash array with an affordable price, it’s the kind of product that should give industry mainstays like HPE and Dell EMC pause for thought.

Overall performance is excellent, with FC SAN speeds a particular highlight, and there’s an embarrassment of port options for the host interface. Showcasing the best aspects of both Lenovo and NetApp, this appliance is perfect for mid-level enterprises.

Read our full Lenovo ThinkSystem DE4000F review.

HIGHLY COMMENDED: StorageCraft OneXafe 4417

StorageCraft has built the OneXafe 4417 primarily with data protection and resiliency in mind, and it’s a perfect match for these kinds of tasks thanks to a heap of clever features. Expanding the size of your estate is simple too, with remarkably quick and easy deployment. It’s the ideal one-stop-shop for backup and disaster recovery.

Read our full StorageCraft OneXafe 4417 review.

Best NAS drive

WINNER: Synology SA3400

Marking the first of Synology’s new ‘SA’ appliances, the SA3400 is a firmly enterprise-class NAS unit that introduces both SAS3 and SATA storage. That’s in combination with a powerful eight-core Xeon-D processor and a maximum memory capacity of 128GB, which offers a pleasing amount of expandability.

It’s good value based on the price tag, but where this appliance really excels is in its performance, with blazing 10GbE speeds of more than 9.3Gbits/sec. Combine that with Synology’s well-rounded library of apps and you have an outstanding NAS that suits a range of uses.

Read our full Synology SA3400 review.

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Qnap TS-983XU-E2124-8G

This 1U NAS product may not look as imposing as some of its rivals, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in versatility. It’s well-suited to running private clouds and containers, and its smart internal design makes it easy to mix and match your drives. Its biggest flaw is that it’s not quite as affordable as we may have liked.

Read our full Qnap TS-983XU-E2124-8G review.

Best printer

WINNER: Xerox VersaLink C500DN

The main strength of Xerox’s VersaLink C500DN lies in its ConnectKey app platform, which lets users access a range of print-related apps, services and functions from its 5in colour touchscreen. Not only does that include a wide range of mobile and cloud printing tools, but it also includes things like automatic translation services - although this is only an option on models with a built-in scanner.

Even without the smart app gallery though, the C500DN is still an outstanding printer thanks to its lightning-fast speeds and fantastic output quality, combined with strong security measures to prevent misuse. Ideal for medium to large enterprises, this machine is a true workhorse.

Read our full Xerox VersaLink C500DN review.

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Kyocera Ecosys P6235cdn

The low price of the Kyocera Ecosys P6235cdn’s consumables, combined with high-capacity bundled cartridges, make this printer fabulously cheap to run. Not only that, but quality and speeds are both great. If you want wireless printing, however, you’ll need to invest £250 in an adapter card, which is a little steep for our tastes.

Read our full Kyocera Ecosys P6235cdn review.

If you want to implement professional video surveillance as an SMB, you could be faced with a big shopping list: you’ll need to acquire a suitable VMS (video management software) product and factor in the cost of a host system, an OS and associated hardware. If that doesn’t sound appealing, however, you could always just cut out the middle men and use Synology’s DVA3219, which offers a complete surveillance platform out of the box.

The DVA3219 takes full advantage of Synology’s Surveillance Station app, which comes as standard on all its appliances. Crucial differences are the DVA3219 includes a pack of eight additional IP camera licenses (to bolster the single license included with Surveillance Station by default), as well as an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti GPU card. It’s also the only model that includes Synology’s Deep Video Analytics (DVA).

DVA offers four features that need GPU power to process: people counting, enhanced intrusion detection, no-idle zones and deep motion detection. People counting requires a ceiling mounted IP camera to conduct head counts of people passing underneath while enhanced intrusion detection allows you to draw a perimeter line anywhere in a camera view so anything that crosses it will trigger an event.

No-idle zones trigger events if objects remain in a predefined zone for too long or leave it when they shouldn’t. Deep motion detection tasks monitor selected areas and filter out movements such as rain or swaying trees to stop them constantly triggering alerts.

Synology DVA3219 review: Hardware and deployment

Costing nearly £1,300, the DV3219 looks good value when stacked up against the completion. The Axis S1116 MT surveillance appliance, for example, comes with a single 8TB HDD and 16 camera licenses included but costs nearly £3,000.

The appliance is well built and very quiet, making it suitable for small offices. At the rear, you have four Gigabit, dual USB 3 and two eSATA storage expansion ports but the HDMI, DisplayPort and DVI outputs on the Nvidia card are hidden behind a blanking plate.

Deployment is swift: we fitted three 14TB Seagate IronWolf NAS drives, used Synology’s discovery web portal to install the DSM software and created a RAID5 storage pool from the Storage Manager app. You’ll need to install the Surveillance Station 8.2 app from the Package Center but this is easily done and the camera license pack is automatically applied.

The DVA3219 has extra levels of versatility as it runs the standard DSM software so every Synology app is available. If your surveillance needs are modest, it can also act as a NAS, IP SAN and backup server.

Synology DVA3219 review: Deep Video Analytics

The DVA app is ready and waiting in the Surveillance Station web console and to test people counting, we used a D-Link 2MP dome camera mounted over the lab entrance. It requires a steady mouse hand as you create a detection zone in the DVA task preview screen, shape and position it and then define a head size.

Initially, it would only count people entering the lab but after a few adjustments, we had had it logging all entries and exits and could view graphs of daily, monthly and yearly footfall. A heat-map feature would have increased its value in retail environments; rivals with this capability provide a coloured map overlay showing customer dwelling habits, allowing shops to see how different areas of their store are performing.

For deep motion detection tasks, you’ll need to define up to two polygonal detection zones, each with individual sensitivity settings. Using a D-Link external bullet camera, we deliberately set the zone to include some trees and found that even in windy conditions, their leafy waves didn’t trigger motion detection.

It gets even easier with intrusion detection; just draw a line in the task preview window to denote a digital barrier, and anything crossing it will trigger alerts. Likewise with no-idle tasks: create a zone, choose a dwell time in seconds and decide whether a trigger is activated if something enters or leaves it.

Another useful feature is crowd control where a people counting task can trigger an alert if entries minus exits exceeds a specific number. These all make the appliance very versatile although it’s annoying that Synology limits the number of DVA tasks to four.

Synology DVA3219 review: Standard surveillance features

The DVA3219 supports up to 32 IP camera feeds and apart from DVA, offers all the same surveillance features as those found on other Synology appliances. Recording options are outstanding as you can set selected cameras to record to a daily schedule, when motion detection events have been triggered, or to just record continuously.

If your cameras support multiple video streams, you can apply different recording settings to each one and use the dynamic option to automatically change the recording stream if motion detection as triggered. It’s easy to manage your video vault too. For each camera, you choose which volume to send its recordings to, set the number of days they should be retained for and control the size of their archive.

A good surveillance solution is also measured by its search facilities and the TimeLine app provides a wealth of features so you don’t have to wade through recordings. Choose to view events such as motion detection for a selected camera and its calendar view will highlight those days when they were triggered, with a slider bar alongside for moving to a specific time.

The Smart Search feature in Synology’s Windows desktop client goes further still, allowing you to look for motion, missing or foreign object, no-idle zone and camera tampering events. You can fine-tune searches by drawing a detection zone within the camera view and only look for events that occurred within this space.

Synology DVA3219 review: Verdict

The DVA3219 makes sense if you want the additional deep video analytics features in the Surveillance Station app but if not, you’re better off with one of Synology’s cheaper, non-GPU-equipped model. It is comparatively good value though, so if you want a brainy surveillance solution that can be easily deployed, the DVA3219 is hard to beat.

SMBs looking for the best storage performance will find all-Flash arrays (AFAs) a great choice, although most mid-range and enterprise level solutions are way beyond their budgets. Synology's FlashStation appliances are designed to offer SMBs a more affordable and versatile NAS/IP SAN solution, with the FS6400 delivering an impressive hardware package for less than 10K.

The FS6400 replaces the FS3017 which was launched early in 2017 and it's endowed with a vastly superior specification. You have a pair of 2.1GHz Intel Xeon Scalable Silver 4110 CPUs in the driving seat and partnered by 32GB of DDR4 ECC memory expandable to 512GB.

The FlashStations are all about choice as they support cheap, high-capacity SATA SSDs, expensive, high-performance SAS3 SSDs and spinning disks as well. With 24 SFF hot-swap bays available, the FS6400 allows SMEs to use a mix of technologies so they can balance performance with their budget and save more cash by using their own choice of storage devices.

Two Synology SAS12G HBAs handle all drive bays and the FS6400 supports two 12-bay RX1217sas or 24-bay RX2417sas external disk shelves - although with only one available expansion port, you can't daisy-chain them over redundant links. Two spare PCIe slots are also available, allowing the dual embedded 10GBase-T ports to be augmented with 10GbE, 25GbE and 40GbE adapters.

Synology FlashStation FS6400 review: RAID F1

Synology's discovery web portal found the appliance on the lab network and downloaded the latest DSM 6.2 OS - winner of this year's 'best software' award from our sister publication PC Pro. We fitted four enterprise-class 1.92TB Micron 5200 Max SATA SSDs and DSM automatically created a RAID F1 array from them.

RAID F1 was developed by Synology to stop SSDs all wearing at equal rates, thereby avoiding the potential for multiple, simultaneous SSD failures. When an F1 array is created, the DSM software automatically nominates one SSD for sacrifice.

It writes more parity blocks to this SSD ensuring it'll reach the end of its lifespan before the other array members. You can keep a close eye on its estimated lifespan from the DSM Storage and Snapshots app and when it is replaced, the array takes the next oldest for this role during the rebuild.

Synology FlashStation FS6400 review: SATA SSD performance

We started our performance tests with iSCSI and called up the lab's Dell PowerEdge T640 Xeon Scalable tower server running Windows Server 2019. Once logged in to a 500GB block-based target over a dedicated 10GbE connection, Iometer reported sequential read and write speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 9.1Gbits/sec.

With a dual 10GbE MPIO connection in action, we saw speeds ramp up nicely to 18.5Gbits/sec and 12.6Gbits/sec. Dropping the Iometer block size to 4KB returned good throughput with the MPIO link delivering sequential read and write rates of 185,200 IOPS and 167,000 IOPS, dropping slightly to 181,300 IOPS and 155,500 IOPS for random operations.

NAS performance is up there too, as a mapped share returned Iometer sequential read and write speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 9.1Gbits/sec. NAS I/O throughput is another winner; here, the share delivered 162,000 IOPS and 129,500 IOPS for sequential reads and writes while random reads and writes settled at 158,000 IOPS and 92,000 IOPS.

We ramped up the pressure by mapping another share on the same Micron-based array to a second Xeon Scalable Windows server over a dedicated 10GbE link. With Iometer running on both servers, we recorded cumulative sequential read and write speeds of 18.5Gbits/sec and 17.2Gbits/sec plus random read and write throughputs of 296,500 IOPS and 171,500 IOPS.

Synology FlashStation FS6400 review: Data protection features

Value gets a boost too, and Synology's DSM 6.2 software offers a superb range of storage and data protection features all included in the price. Whereas many competing AFAs require license upgrades for feature enhancements and to increase the number of snapshots supported, DSM allows you to create up to 1,024 per NAS share and a total of 65,536 per system.

Support for BTRFS volumes brings NAS share and iSCSI LUN snapshots into play. Managed by the Snapshot Replication app, we created snapshots on demand and scheduled them at regular intervals as often as every five minutes.

LUN snapshots can also be managed directly from the iSCSI Manager app and data recovery is a cinch - simply choose a snapshot, clone it or copy it in place. NAS snapshot restoration is run from the Snapshot Replication app and if you opt to browse their contents, it loads the File Station app where you can download a file or email it as an attachment.

Synology FlashStation FS6400 review: Virtualization

Virtualization features are in abundance as DSM is certified for use with VMware's vSphere and VAAI software, so the appliance's advanced iSCSI LUNs support features such as hardware assisted locking, full copy, full clone and thin provisioning. And then there's DSM's very own Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) app which allows the appliance to host VMs running pretty much any OS you fancy.

The VMM dashboard provides quick access to VMs and the vSwitch service can be used to isolate them on specific network ports. Even better, VMM offers protection plans for scheduled backups of selected VMs using snapshots, as well as facilities for applying retention policies to achieve a desired RPO (recovery point objective) in hours, days or weeks.

The VMM app has another trick up its virtual sleeve as you can use it to run other instances of DSM. You get one free license included as standard, allowing you to create a virtual appliance and present a specific set of storage services.

Synology FlashStation FS6400 review: Verdict

With its single expansion port and lack of dual controllers, the FS6400 doesn't offer the same levels of redundancy as many competing AFAs but it beats them handsomely for value. It offers a powerful Xeon Scalable package for the price, Synology's DSM software delivers a wealth of storage features as standard and overall performance using low-cost SATA SSDs is impressive.

Coming in as the replacement for Synology's RS18017xs+ NAS appliance, the SA3400 aims to deliver a big boost in features and performance. It's the first in Synology's line of enterprise-class SA' appliances where the new naming convention indicates support for SAS3 and SATA storage.

There's a lot more on offer than just SAS3 support though. This 2U 12-bay rack NAS sports an 8-core 2.1GHz Xeon D-1541 CPU, teamed up with 16GB of server-grade DDR4 ECC RDIMM memory which can be upgraded to a healthy 128GB. The discontinued RS18017xs+ supports SAS3 storage but has a six-core 2.2GHz Xeon D-1531 and slower 2,133MHz DDR4 memory.

Port-wise, there are no changes as the SA3400 also provides quad Gigabit and a pair of 10GBaseT. The two rear USB 3 ports can be used to add extra storage devices while an external SAS port supports seven RX1217sas or RX2417sas expansion shelves for a maximum of 180 drives.

Synology SA3400 review: Design and expansion

The SA3400 exhibits the classy build quality we've come to expect from Synology, presented as it is in a sturdy steel chassis. The metal drive carriers can't be key locked but a small tab on each one can be pushed across to stop them being accidentally popped out.

Cracking the lid reveals a tidy interior with the Xeon CPU mounted by a large passive heatsink and partnered by four DIMM slots, with the base memory provided on a single 16GB stick. All storage is managed by a Synology SAS12G PCIe card, which provides the external SAS expansion port and is cabled directly to the drive backplane.

Two PCIe slots are free for further expansion, and the SA3400 supports a good range of industry-standard 10GbE, 25GbE and 40GbE network adapters. We tested this with a dual-port Emulex 10GBaseT adapter, which was accepted without any problems

Cooling is handled by a bank of four hot-plug fans behind the drive backplane with a solid air shroud directing air from the centre two fans over the CPU. Noise levels are intrusive though, as even on the slowest fan setting, we recorded high sound levels of 66.5dB at one metre in front of the appliance.

Synology SA3400 review: Great 10GbE performance

For performance testing, we installed four 16TB Seagate Exos X16 enterprise SATA hard disks, ran Synology's web-based discovery wizard and created a 44TB RAID5 storage pool. With the appliance hooked up over 10GbE to a Dell PowerEdge T640 Xeon Scalable tower running Windows Server 2019, we saw a mapped NAS share return fast Iometer sequential read and write speeds both of 9.3Gbits/sec.

The good news continued with our real-world tests as copies of a 25GB test file delivered read and write rates of 5.6Gbits/sec and 5Gbits/sec. Our backup test was also handled well with a 22.4GB folder holding 10,500 small files secured to the share at a speedy 2.5Gbits/sec.

IP SAN speeds are equally impressive; a 1TB iSCSI target delivered Iometer read and write rates both of 9.3Gbits/sec. We ramped up the pressure with a dual 10GbE MPIO link and saw speeds increase nicely to 18.5Gbits/sec and 17.1Gbits/sec all with the appliance's CPU snoozing at 15% utilisation.

Synology SA3400 review: Classy backup apps

If you're looking for top-quality data protection and backup features, then look no further: Synology's DSM software is brimming with apps. The Snapshot Replication app supports manual and scheduled NAS and IP SAN snapshots on BTRFS volumes and offers fast recovery services, which include the option to browse NAS snapshots and restore files directly from the File Station app.

Synology's Active Backup for Business (ABB) app takes data protection to the next level, providing a central location for securing servers, workstations and virtual environments. It supports agentless backup services for VMware vCentre and ESXi hypervisors, provides application-consistent backups of virtual machines (VMs) and best of all, it's completely free.

After loading the ABB agents on our Windows servers and workstations, we could schedule volume, file and bare-metal backups. Recovery features are outstanding as you can recreate systems as VMware VMs or use the ABB web portal for swift file and folder restores.

The Hyper Backup app presents a single console for managing local, remote, Rsync, cloud and iSCSI LUN backups and it integrates with Synology's C2 Backup cloud service for off-site storage. The Drive app also provides Dropbox-like sync services for Windows workstations plus iOS and Android mobiles with the Drive agent loaded.

Synology SA3400 review: Virtualisation and surveillance

The SA3400's high capacity makes it a fine candidate for running Synology's Surveillance Station 8.2 app. It supports over 7,200 IP camera models, offers a wealth of video recording and playback tools and can enforce secure dual-authentication access to recordings.

You can even turn your iOS or Android mobile into an IP camera with the LiveCam app which sends live video and audio streams directly to the Surveillance Station console and records them. It's easy to use as well: simply enter the appliance's address in the LiveCam app on your mobile, log in and tap the Play button.

The Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) app adds extra versatility as it allows the appliance to host VMs running any OS you fancy. We created a Windows Server 2019 VM in 15 minutes, presented it on a dedicated virtual switch created from the appliance's Gigabit ports and used the app's built-in protection plans to take regular snapshot backups.

Synology SA3400 review: Verdict

For a 12-bay NAS appliance that supports SAS3 and SATA storage, the SA3400 is comparatively good value. NAS and iSCSI performance over 10GbE is impeccable, it has plenty of room to expand and Synology's DSM software offers a remarkable range of features including plenty of free backup apps.

Synology SA3400 specifications

SMBs with big data backups on their minds will love Synology's DS2419+; this mighty cube offers an impressive network storage capacity at a sensible price. Stepping in as a timely replacement to the elderly DS2415+, it uses the same charcoal-black 12-bay chassis but offers more expansion options and its uprated Atom C3538 CPU and faster DDR4 memory deliver a big performance boost.

At the rear you still get quad Gigabit, dual USB 3 and a high-speed Infiniband port for Synology's 12-bay expansion unit but the DS2419+ adds that all-important PCI-e slot for 10GbE upgrades. This also accepts Synology's M2D18 card which supports dual M.2 NVMe/SATA SSDs for caching duties.

For testing, we used four 12TB Seagate IronWolf NAS drives in a RAID5 array and fitted an Emulex dual-port 10Gbase-T card by sliding off the appliance's lid. The two SO-DIMM slots are also easily accessed by removing the side panel.

The DS2419+ is much faster than its predecessor with a NAS share mapped over 10GbE returning Iometer sequential read and write speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 4.4Gbits/sec. The quoted top speeds for the DS2415+ are only 3.5Gbits/sec and 3.2Gbits/sec.

Real world NAS speeds are equally good with our 25GB file copy test returning average read and write speeds of 4.7Gbits/sec and 3.3Gbits/sec. Our backup test was also handled well with a 22.4GB test folder and its 10,500 small files secured to the mapped share at 2.2Gbits/sec.

Synology's DSM OS provides a wealth of free apps and the Active Backup for Business (ABB) fits this high-capacity appliance like a glove. From one interface, you can manage backup, restore and disaster recovery services for Windows servers and workstations, plus VMware ESXi and vCentre hypervisors.

To run application-consistent backups for our VMware ESXi VMs, we provided ABB with secure login credentials to the host system while our Windows 2016 and 10 systems required agents loaded. For the latter, we created scheduled protection jobs and chose from bare-metal, system volume and selective backups.

The ABB console provides a complete overview of all backup activities and during testing, we recorded its deduplication engine delivering an impressive 6:1 data reduction ratio. It also provides fast system recovery by linking up with VMware or Synology's Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) app to create instant VMs from selected backups.

Data protection features keep on coming: the Snapshot Replication app manages on-demand and scheduled snapshots of Btrfs volumes and can replicate them to remote Synology appliances. Next up is the Hyper Backup app which supports local, remote and Rysnc backups, followed closely by the Cloud Sync app for securing appliance data to 23 cloud storage providers.

The VMM app can host your choice of OS and offers VM protection plans, cloning and migration - but you'll need to upgrade the appliance's base 4GB of memory to make the most of it. The vSwitch feature isolates VM traffic on selected network interfaces and you can use VMM to virtualize DSM with one free license included.

The appliance makes a great surveillance video recording vault and Synology's Surveillance Station 8.2 app is one of the best on the market. It now supports around 6,700 IP camera models and uses dual authentication for secure access to recordings while the smart LiveCam app allows you to stream live video from your mobile directly to the Surveillance Station console.

Its big capacity makes Synology's DS2419+ a great choice for SMBs that want a central location for storing all their backups. It's good value and a speedy performer while Synology's slick Active Backup for Business app seals the deal for a well-deserved Editor's Choice award.

Verdict

Its big capacity makes Synology’s DS2419+ a great choice for SMBs that want a central location for storing all their backups. It’s good value and a speedy performer, while Synology’s slick Active Backup for Business app seals the deal for a well-deserved Editor’s Choice award.

Desktop chassis

2.1GHz Intel Atom C3538

4GB DDR4 (max 32GB)

12 x hot-swap SATA drive bays

supports RAID0, 1, 5, 6, 10, SHR, JBOD

4 x Gigabit

2 x USB 3

Infiniband expansion port

1 x PCI-Express slot

300 x 340 x 270mm (WDH)

3yr limited warranty

Synology's DS1819+ delivers the hardware upgrade this popular 8-bay NAS appliance has been crying out for. Out goes the flawed Atom C2538 CPU from its predecessor, the DS1817+, and in comes a more powerful quad-core 2.1GHz Atom C3538 and support for faster DDR4 memory.

Memory starts at 4GB and can be easily upgraded to 32GB as the two SO-DIMM slots are located behind a removable hatch in the base. Port permutations haven't changed; you still get a quartet of Gigabit Ethernet ports plus three USB 3 ports at the rear and one at the front, while the dual eSATA ports team up with Synology's DX517 5-bay expansion units to push the drive count to 18.

10-Gigabit (10GbE) upgrades are on the cards too - the appliance's PCI-E slot accepts a range of industry-standard 10GbE network adapters. Alternatively, you can install Synology's M2D18 dual-slot M.2 SATA/NVMe SSD card to provide a high-performance cache.

Deployment is a cinch, and Synology's discovery web portal found the appliance on our network and downloaded the latest DSM 6.2 software. We installed four 12TB Seagate IronWolf drives in the tool-free carriers and used the Storage Manager app to create a single SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) storage pool although traditionalists can choose standard RAID5 or 6 arrays.

Data protection is an area DSM excels at. Its Snapshot Replication app supports on-demand and scheduled snapshots of Btrfs volumes with NAS folders and iSCSI LUNs and can replicate them to remote Synology appliances. The Hyper Backup app handles all manner of local, remote and Rysnc backups while the Cloud Sync app can secure appliance data to a wide choice of cloud providers.

However, the star of Synology's protection detail is the new Active Backup for Business (ABB) app, which delivers full backup, restore and disaster recovery services for Windows servers and workstations plus VMware vCentre and ESXi hypervisors. Windows systems require agents loaded which can be downloaded directly from the ABB app while VMware VM application-consistent backups just need a secure connection to vSphere.

We had no problems logging ABB in to our VMware ESXi host where it listed all VMs for backup source selection. With agents loaded on our Windows 2016 servers and Windows 10 desktops, we could also create scheduled protection tasks and choose from bare-metal, system volume or selective backups.

ABB performs deduplication and during our backup tests, we saw it report impressive reduction ratios of up to 6:1. Even better, ABB works with VMware hosts or DSM's Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) app and can create instant VMs from selected backups for disaster recovery purposes.

The DS1819+ is significantly faster than the DS1817+, too. With a share mapped over 10GbE to a Dell EMC T640 Xeon Scalable tower running Windows Server 2016, we watched Iometer report raw read and write NAS speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 4.8Gbits/sec.

The DS1819+ fared equally well in our real world tests. Our 25GB test file was read from the share at 5Gbits/sec and written to it at 3.9Gbits/sec. Backup performance was another winner and our 22.4GB folder and its 10,500 small files was secured at an average of 2.4Gbits/sec.

Tests run on a DS1817+ returned 4.4Gbits/sec and 3.2Gbits/sec for the single file copy test and a slower 1.5Gbits/sec for the backup test. The DS1819+ also handled encrypted shares better with our 25GB file written down at 1.6Gbits/sec -- 0.5Gbits/sec faster than the DS1817+.

The DS1819+ is a great choice for presenting IP SANs with a 500GB target returning Iometer read and write speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 6.3Gbits/sec. Running the same test on a DS1817+ saw read and write speeds tumble to only 3.5Gbits/sec and 1.6Gbits/sec.

There's no doubt the CPU and memory upgrades have given Synology's 8-bay desktop appliance a new lease of life. It's fast over 10GbE, offers a high storage capacity and Synology's classy Active Backup Suite collection of apps make it a prime candidate for small business backup.

Synology launched its first 6-bay NAS appliance, the DS3018xs, last year, joining its 5-bay and 7-bay units. But this year sees the introduction of the more powerful DS1618+, which has been specifically designed for small businesses that need lots of storage at a lower cost.

Some of the Synology DiskStation DS1618+'s headline upgrades include its revamped Atom C3538 CPU and capacious 32GB DDR4 memory capacity that transform it into a worthy upgrade for businesses looking to migrate perhaps from an older NAS. It also presents as a viable alternative to Synology's 5-bay DS1517+ and 8-bay DS1817+ which are both pretty outdated now, running on the more sluggish Atom C2538 chips.

From a design point of view though, nothing has changed much. The chassis is still robust and sturdy, offering the impression that this desktop NAS won't buckle under pressure. There's quad Gigabit, triple USB 3 and dual eSATA ports if connectivity is important to you, with a PCI-Express slot for use with 10GbE adapters or Synology's proprietary M2D18 dual M.2 NVMe/SSD high-speed cache card.

There are various configuration options available. For example, memory starts at 4GB, but if you want to boost that, it's a pretty simple process - just top up the memory by upgrading SO-DIMM memory in the two slots behind a removable hatch under the cover. If you want to add more racks to the NAS, you can extend via two eSATA ports that allow you to add-on more of Synology's 5-bay DX517 expansion units.

The appliance uses tool-free drive carriers and for testing, we slipped in a quartet of 10TB Seagate IronWolf hard disks. We availed ourselves of Synology's browser discovery service and allowed it to create a big 27.3TB SHR-1 (Synology Hybrid RAID) array.

Traditionalists can skip this and choose standard RAID5 or 6 arrays but SHR is designed to simplify array expansion just by adding more disks. Even better, you can change an SHR-1 array on the fly to an SHR-2 dual-drive redundant array.

It's been six months in the making but Synology's DSM 6.2 is out of beta testing and ready for some live action. Look no further if data protection is on your mind, as it's brimming with backup features.

For starters, BTRFS volumes support on-demand and scheduled snapshots which can be replicated to remote Synology appliances. Next up is the Hyper Backup app which manages all your local, remote, Rysnc and cloud backups and has wizards for 19 task types.

The Cloud Sync app supports 22 public providers and we used the Cloud Station Server app to create a private cloud for workstation and mobile backups. The Active Backup for Business app doesn't need a local agent as it can secure network shares on Windows and Linux systems.

With a maximum 32GB of memory, the DS1618+ can be a virtualisation host for any OS of your choice. We used the Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) app to load up a Windows Server 2016 VM in 20 minutes, employed protection plans to regularly snapshot the VM and created copies using the clone option.

Synology's Surveillance Station app offers a wealth of IP camera monitoring and video recording services. You get two camera licenses included in the price and we linked it up with our Axis M3015-LVE and Samsung Wisenet PNF-9010R cameras, created recording schedules, enabled motion detection and used the e-Map facility to pinpoint their location.

For 10GbE speed testing, we installed an Emulex 10GBase-T adapter which the DS1618+ accepted without any issues. With a share mapped to an E5-2600 v4 Xeon Windows server, we recorded fast Iometer sequential read speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec but much lower 4.3Gbits/sec write rates. Adding a second server with a dedicated mapped share and 10GbE connection saw cumulative read and write rates of 11.9Gbits/sec and 5.1Gbits/sec.

Although less significant, we saw similar discrepancies in our real-world tests as our 25GB test file was read from the appliance at 4.8Gbits/sec, but written to it at 3.4Gbits/sec. General backup performance was better though, with a 22.4GB folder containing 10,500 small files secured to a share at a respectable 2.3Gbits/sec.

Its new Atom CPU and big DDR4 memory capacity makes the DS1618+ a great choice for handling a wide range of network storage duties with room on top for plenty of apps. 10GbE performance is a little uneven but is good enough for the target market of small businesses and at 634 for a diskless unit, it's great value as well.

Verdict

Its new Atom CPU and big DDR4 memory capacity makes the Synology RackStation DS1618+ a great choice for handling a wide range of network storage duties with room on top for plenty of apps. 10GbE performance is a little uneven but is good enough for the target market of small businesses and at £634 for a diskless unit, it’s great value as well.

Desktop chassis

2.1GHz Intel Atom C3538 CPU

4GB DDR4 (max 32GB)

6 x LFF/SFF hot-swap SATA drive bays

supports RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 6, SHR-1/2, hot-spare, JBOD

4 x Gigabit, 3 x USB 3

2 x eSATA

PCI-Express slot

3 year hardware warranty

Where there used to be a gulf in capabilities between your basic, budget 2-bay NAS and the all-singing, all-dancing appliances, it's one that's being bridged by models like the Synology DS218. 250 buys you a speedy two-bay NAS with all the features of Synology's DSM operating system plus enough performance to take advantage.

The design is classic Synology, with the two tool-less bays covered by a nicely bevelled matte-black plastic chassis and the drive bays covered by a curved magnetic flap. With the drives removed you can access an additional SODIMM slot, enabling you to add a further 4GB to the 2GB of installed RAM. It's a shame that you can't connect this quiet NAS to a TV and use it as a media player, with no HDMI port: with a single USB 2.0 port at the front, a USB 3.0 port at the rear and a single Gigabit Ethernet port, connectivity is basic.

That's where the disappointments end. The web-based installation routine couldn't be much easier, and while you're left to configure RAID volumes, users and shares yourself, it's all intuitive. The setup defaults to Synology's SHR configuration, which tries to balance the capacity of a RAID0 array with the resilience of RAID1, even when using drives of different capacities. You can also encrypt your files folder by folder.

The DS218 has basic storage and backup covered, but a whole lot more besides. It works flawlessly as a media server, streaming 1080p and 4K video to a Samsung Smart TV, Android phones and Windows laptops with real-time transcoding, although frame rates were a little choppy where there wasn't a Gigabit Ethernet link the whole way through. You can run a mail server, VPN server or WordPress websites or implement Synology's Drive, Chat and Office apps. With a Realtek quad-core CPU and 2GB of RAM, these aren't quite as responsive as they are on the higher-end DS918+, but they could still service a small team.

Performance in our CrystalDiskMark sequential and 4K random read tests was solid, but note that read and write speeds with larger files are fairly slow. Still, the DS218 is all about maximum features for minimal cost. It might not have the performance of a powerhouse NAS, but you'll be amazed at what this little appliance can do.

If the DS218 and DS418 reflect the value side of Synology's latest line-up, the DS918+ sits at the performance end. Where those two are powered by quad-core ARM-based Realtek processors with just 2GB of RAM, the high-end model has the quad-core Celeron J3455 and 4GB ready to go.

Synology doesn't go in for LCD displays or gleaming LED status bars, and instead simple indicators tell you what's going on with the NAS and the HDDs. Nor does it go overboard on connectivity, with a single USB 3 port at the front and another one at the rear, along with dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. Yet there's something elegant and functional about the design of the DS918+. The four caddies slide out easily and you can add and remove drives in seconds, with the clips that hold them in place working perfectly. In general operation, it's a very quiet and unobtrusive NAS.

It's expandable, too. Turn the unit upside down and remove the covers and you can fit up to two NVMe 2280 M.2 SSDs, which the NAS will use as a speed-boosting cache. Remove all the drives and you can get to a second SODIMM slot, enabling you to boost the 4GB of preinstalled memory up to 8GB. There's even an eSATA port on the rear to connect an additional hard disk or SSD, not to mention Synology's own 5-bay DX517 expansion unit. This takes the maximum capacity of the NAS from 48TB up to a staggering 108TB.

The DS918+'s beefed-up specification makes a tangible difference when you're running more intensive apps, and if you want to take full advantage of Synology's app ecosystem, the DS918+ is definitely the NAS to buy. Install Synology Drive, Synology Chat and Synology Office and you have a workable alternative to Google's G Suite suitable for a small team, except here it's running on in-house hardware rather than in the cloud. Sure, the feature set of the office apps is limited in comparison to Google Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides, but if you're after privacy and control that's a compromise you might be willing to make.

Otherwise, you get all the benefits of Synology's DSM OS, including simple, browser-based setup and configuration and a vast selection of apps. Individual shares can be protected with hardware-based 256-bit AES encryption, and the software supports 2-step verification to prevent unauthorised users from logging on. Synology's Hybrid RAID (SHR) technology offers a different, more flexible approach, enabling you to create volumes from disks of different sizes, with an effective balance between maximum capacity and RAID redundancy.

You can connect the DS918+ to Amazon S3, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box and Google Drive, run virtual machines or Docker containers, use it as a security PVR with Surveillance Station or set up a WordPress or Joomla CMS. And while it doesn't have the HDMI outputs or add-in apps to function as a media player or moonlight as a desktop Linux PC, its media server capabilities are hard to fault, down to streaming and transcoding 1080p and 4K video content on the fly.

At times Synology seems to be trying too hard to replicate every cloud-based service on a NAS drive, and we can't really see the point of the slick but vapid Moments photo manager and streamer, but the polish of its apps and their user interfaces is in a different league from the competition.

If the DS918+ falls down anywhere, it's raw file-transfer performance. Don't get us wrong - this is a speedy NAS, particularly when it comes to sustained file transfers of large media files - but it's not as adept at handling lots of smaller files in comparison to other appliances.

How much performance matters depends on what type of NAS you're looking for. If you're buying for business rather than home, this is one of the best overall packages around, and the same goes if you're more swayed by Synology's Google Drive-like features than media player skills. This is a powerful, easy to work with NAS with serious potential to grow.

Verdict

How much performance matters depends on what type of NAS you’re looking for. If you’re buying for business rather than home, this is one of the best overall packages around, and the same goes if you’re more swayed by Synology’s Google Drive-like features thanmedia player skills. This is a powerful, easy to work with NAS with serious potential to grow.

As Synology's first 3U rack NAS appliance in its 'Plus' series, the RS2818RP+ aims to offer cost-conscious SMEs a more affordable but equally capacious alternative to its large-scale RS4018xs+. With 16 hot-swap SATA drive bays, it has the same impressive storage capacity but cuts costs by losing the dual embedded 10GBase-T ports offered by its big brother and dropping to one Infiniband disk shelf expansion port.

Processing power is also scaled back as the RS2818RP+ has a simpler quad-core 2.1GHz Atom C3538. Even so, this is small price to pay for the near-2,000 reduction, and this CPU also allows the resident 4GB of non-ECC DDR4 memory to be expanded to 64GB.

High-speed 10GbE connections are still possible thanks to the RS2818RP+'s single PCI-Express expansion slot. For performance testing, we fitted an Emulex dual-port 10GBase-T card which was accepted without any complaints.

We had no problems loading a quartet of 10TB Seagate IronWolf SATA NAS drives although the carriers are not the tool-free variety. We then dropped into Synology's discovery web portal and left it to initialize the system and load the latest production DSM 6.1 software.

The RS2818RP+ is designed to be a high-capacity storage repository for data backup and file services. Along with RAID5 and 6 protection, it offers Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) arrays which simplifies RAID choices and also supports an SHR-2 dual-drive redundancy option.

The Atom CPU is the 64-bit variety so the appliance can run all DSM apps. Data backup tools are in abundance with BTRFS volumes supporting NAS and IP SAN snapshots, which we ran manually and scheduled at regular intervals using the Snapshot Replication app.

The Cloud Station Server app teams up with the Backup Windows workstation client to provide one-way synchronization. Use the Cloud Station Drive agent on your workstations and you can run two-way synchronizations.

The Active Backup for Servers app secures data on Windows and Linux systems just using network shares, and Synology also offers free Active Backup apps for G Suite and Office 365. Clouds are on Synology's horizon as the Cloud Station Server app provides excellent private backup and file sharing services while the Cloud Sync app supports 22 public providers.

With our IronWolf drives configured as a big 27.3TB RAID5 array, the RS2818RP+ delivered a variable 10GbE performance. A NAS share mapped to a Dell PowerEdge R540 with dual Xeon Gold 6130 CPUs and running Windows Server 2016 returned excellent Iometer sequential reads of 9.2Gbit/sec but write rates fell markedly to 4.2Gbit/sec.

Our real world tests bore these out with drag and drop copies of a 25GB test file returning average read and write rates of 4.2Gbit/sec and 3.3Gbit/sec. Our backup test was better handled; securing a 22.4GB folder with 10,500 small files averaged a respectable 2.2Gbit/sec.

Encryption performance is reasonable with our 25GB file copied to an encrypted folder at 1.4Gbit/sec. However, this is far short of Qnap's spectacular TS-1277 desktop appliance as its Ryzen CPU returned a more impressive 2.7Gbit/sec for this test.

Synology's DSM 6.2 beta looks full of promise and includes the new Virtual Machine Manager which allows the appliance to host VMs running your choice of OS. You'll need to upgrade the resident 4GB of memory to get the best out of it but it provides a vSwitch feature to isolate VM traffic on selected network interfaces and Protection Plans for regularly snapshotting your VMs.

The new iSCSI Manager app adds more IP SAN features including simplified target management and faster snapshot and recovery processes. The Storage Manager app also gets a makeover and replaces the confusing Disk Groups and RAID Groups with Storage Pools.

General write speeds for NAS operations could be better but the RS2818RP+ offers an impressive network storage package for the price. It has a very high capacity backed up by dual-redundant PSUs while Synology's DSM software delivers a superb range of backup and cloud features.

Verdict

General write speeds for NAS operations could be better but the RS2818RP+ offers an impressive network storage package for the price. It has a very high capacity backed up by dual-redundant PSUs while Synology’s DSM software delivers a superb range of backup and cloud features.

3U rackmount chassis

2.1GHz Intel Atom C3538

4GB DDR4 (max 64GB)

16 x LFF/SFF hot-swap SATA drive bays

Supports RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 6, SHR, hot-spare, JBOD

4 x Gigabit, 2 x USB 3

1 x Expansion port, PCI-Express slot

2 x 500W hot-plug PSUs

3 year hardware warranty

Stepping up as the successor to the three-year old RS815+, Synology's RS818+ is its first 1U rack NAS to support 10GbE upgrades. There's little else to distinguish this new member of the family as it uses the same quad-core 2.4GHz Atom C2538 as its predecessor, but its dual SO-DIMM slots allow the base 2GB of DDR3 memory to be boosted to 16GB (the RS815+ only supports 6GB).

Memory upgrades for the RS815+ were achieved by sliding the entire the motherboard tray out from the rear. This feature been removed on the RS818+ so you just undo the four screws holding the lid down, which gives equally easy access to the memory slots.

The standard port count remains the same and comprises quad embedded Gigabit and dual USB 3. The RS818+ also has the eSATA port at the rear for connecting Synology's 4-bay RX418 disk shelf, allowing capacity with certified 12TB drives to be boosted to an impressive 96TB (the older RX415 version isn't supported).

Synology offers the RS818RP+ model, which comes with power redundancy in the shape of dual 150W hot-plug power supplies. You pay a premium for this though, as a diskless RS818+ costs 789 whereas the RP+ version pushes this to 1,058.

Synology RackStation RS818+: RAID and 10GbE expansion

We loaded up a quartet of 8TB Seagate NAS SATA hard disks in the appliance's solid metal drive carriers. Deployment is swift; Synology's discovery web portal found the appliance on the lab network, initialized it and loaded the latest production DSM 6.1 software which presents a very user-friendly interface.

From the Storage Manager app, we created a big 22TB RAID5 Disk Group but there are plenty of other options to choose from. Along with standard RAID6 protection, the RS818+ offers Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) arrays which are designed to simplify your RAID choices and also support an SHR-2 dual-drive redundancy option.

For 10GbE testing, we installed an Emulex dual-port 10GBase-T card in the low-profile slot which was accepted without any complaints. You have a good range of high-speed options as the appliance is certified for industry-standard Intel and Emulex copper and fibre 10GbE cards, plus Synology's own single and dual-port cards.

Cooling is handled by three dual rotor fans at the rear and we found noise levels to be reasonably low. Using the excellent SPLnFTT iOS app on our iPad, we measured sound levels of 45dB from one metre in front, making the RS818+ a good choice for small offices.

Synology RackStation RS818+: 10GbE performance

Our performance tests showed the limitations of the Atom CPU, as although read speeds were very impressive, write speeds were significantly lower. With a NAS share mapped to a Dell PowerEdge R540 rack server with dual 16-core Xeon Gold 6130 CPUs and running Windows Server 2016, we saw Iometer return high sequential reads of 7.9Gbits/sec but only 3.2Gbits/sec for write operations.

It was the same story for our real world tests, with drag and drop copies of a 25GB test file returning average read and write rates of 4.6Gbits/sec and 3.1Gbits/sec. Backup performance was reasonable though, as securing a 22.4GB folder with 10,500 small files averaged a respectable 1.9Gbits/sec.

The Atom CPU also struggled with our encryption test. Copying our 25GB file to an encrypted folder over 10GbE saw a sustained average of only 1.1Gbits/sec, putting the RS818+ amongst the lowest performers for this test.

Synology RackStation RS818+: Backup apps

The RS818+ targets services such as backup and its 64-bit CPU means it can run all of Synology's data protection apps. During volume creation, make sure you select the BTRFS option as this enables NAS share and IP SAN snapshots, which can be run manually and scheduled at regular intervals using the Snapshot Replication app.

The Hyper Backup app manages all your local, remote, Rysnc and cloud backups from one console and also integrates with Synology's C2 Backup cloud service. Perfect for essential off-site backups, we had no problems running Hyper Backup jobs that secured selected folders on the appliance to cloud storage.

Cloud features are exemplary as the Cloud Sync app can now synchronize appliance data with 22 providers including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Drive, Dropbox, Google and OneDrive. The Cloud Station Server app teams up with the Backup Windows workstation client to provide one-way synchronization while the Cloud Station Drive agent extends this to two-way synchronizations.

Agentless backup is possible too as the Active Backup for Servers app secures selected data on Windows and Linux systems just using network shares. We also used the Snapshot Replication app to replicate NAS folders and IP SAN LUNs to another Synology appliance for disaster recovery.

Synology RackStation RS818+: Verdict

With a price tag for a diskless unit that's shade under 800, the RS818+ looks good value and is only slightly more costly that the RS815+ it's replacing. The additional 10GbE upgrade options increase its versatility but a CPU upgrade would have been welcome as the Atom C2538 is nearly five years old.

NAS write performance sees no improvements but if it's backup features you're looking for then Synology's DSM software won't disappoint. Its myriad data protection apps are exceptional and it offers unbeatable cloud features as well.

Verdict

An affordable and compact rack NAS with a wealth of data protection features and 10GbE upgrade potential but let down by its elderly Atom CPU and underwhelming write speeds

Chassis: 1U rack

CPU: 2.4GHz Intel Atom C2538

Memory: 2GB DDR3 (max 16GB)

Storage: 4 x hot-swap SATA drive bays

Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 6, hot-spare, JBOD, SHR

Network: 4 x Gigabit

Other ports: 2 x USB 3

Expansion: 1 x eSATA

Power: Internal PSU

Management: Web browser

Warranty: 3-year limited

Options: RX418 4-bay expansion unit, £496 ex VAT