Synology NASes are renowned as trendy
products, so three products that we checked have left a really good impression.
They feature by its durable cases and efficient coolers. They are easy to use
even for inexperienced users. Diverse functions of the firmware is figured out
because the truth is that the electrical installation instruction is about 200
pages long and does not include all of the available software. The firmware is
updated regularly and covers released products years ago.
DS413j
is a new entry NAS which is good for family applications.
A high price is a weakness of Synology NAS.
Considering many of their price levels, including software, which is the same
for each NAS, we cannot expect them to be cheaper at least in a near future.
Limiting the firmware’s capacities will increase the expenses of checking,
optimizing and supporting and hardly create any logical solution. Moreover, NAS
designed for 4 disks or more is considerably more expensive compared to the
two-disk products with the same configuration.
We require dual-disks for almost all
families. Only when you are sure that the capacity of 8 TB is not enough for
you, you should consider the NASes that we have discussed. Beside the exterior
differences (hot transferring and I/O connection), we have different hardware
platform.
Our tests show that they have the same
performance when considering about networking data access, except for the using
of RAID5/6. If you want the fast arrays of the junior type, you might want to
think of the senior template. The junior, however, still works very well. These
NASes turn out to be very fast. It is the Gigabit Ethernet connections, not the
hardware platform that makes everything slower.
DS412+
is the most multi-functional template, which has high performance on x86
platform and can operate different specialized software as well as support high
speed access with fault-tolerant RAID.
Just for specific applications that
structures and specifications of the CPU influence the performance. The top NAS
can process the images and videos faster, although a desktop would be a good selection
for this task? The test on NAS is supported to meet expectation.
The power saving factors may also relate to
the choice of the specific products. However, the templates that based on Arm
and PPC consume less power than the x86 based template. The fact can be
important for you to choose UPS, although even junior UPS can operate NAS like
that on their battery for at least one hour.
This is a summary for each tested product.
DS413j is a new entry NAS which is good for family applications. DS413 is
perfect for business people, who need high performance, HDD hot-swapping and
high-speed I/O interface. DS412+ is the most multi-functional template, which
has high performance on x86 platform and can operate different specialized
software as well as support high speed access with fault-tolerant RAID.
DS413
is perfect for business people, who need high performance, HDD hot-swapping and
high-speed I/O interface.
As you can see, all of the three Synology
products receive applauses and good feedbacks. These network storage devices
are practically perfect in all aspects. However we believe that there is just
one among these three is crowned our absolute favorite and receives the title
of Editor’s Choice – Synology DS413. This template offers an exceptional
combination of the rich functionalities, high performance and low power
consumption level. It supports high speed HDD swapping and the most important
thing is its very reasonable price.