Hard drives are now down to pre-Thailand
flood prices, with higher capacity options than ever before. And if you’ve been
maxing out your new fiber Internet connection, you’re going to need somewhere
to store all the stuff you’ve downloaded. What better place to put everything
than in a NAS like the Synology DiskStation DS412+?
Synology
DiskStation DS412+
The DS412+ is a four-bay NAS that has a
straightforward procedure for installing hard drives: Simply unlatch the drive
racks, screw the drives on, and re-insert the racks into the NAS. Oddly enough,
Synology opted to use plastic for the drive racks. The drives can be kept from
view with a snap-on plastic cover.
Internally, Synology outfits the NAS with a
decent selection of hardware. Powering the DS412+ is a dual-core Intel Atom
D2700 processor, as well as 1GB of DDR3 memory. Like most of Synology’s
higher-end NAS solutions, you can upgrade the memory to a maximum of 3GB.
Two
large fans at the rear ensure optimal cooling for the four drives you can install
within.
In terms of connectivity, you get three USB
ports to connect additional storage or other devices such as printers. There’s
one USB 2.0 port up front, and a pair of USB 3.0 ports at the rear. You also
get a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports, complete with support for aggregation,
failover, and separate LAN modes. Last but not least, there’s an eSATA port for
even more external storage.
The DS412+ is powered by an external power
brick, which helps keep heat levels within the NAS lower.
We tested the DS412+ with a quartet of 2TB
Seagate hard drives configured in RAID 5. With the Intel NAS Performance
Toolkit, HD Video playback and record scored 56.4MB/s and 111.6MB/s
respectively. The content creation and office productivity portions scored
9.4MB/s and 24.4MB/s each. File copies to and from the box averaged 118.4MB/s
and 65.4MB/s respectively, while directory copies to and from averaged 10.1MB/s
and 11.1MB/s respectively. In the NAS Performance Tester benchmark, we also
recorded average read and write speeds of 63.6MB/s and 109.2MB/s respectively,
with a 1TB test file.
The
right side of the front panel contains the yellow green status LEDs and USB 2.0
port.
It’s clear that the DS412+ is far from a
slouch when it comes to raw performance. It would have been better to see a
more solid construction for some parts (drive racks and snap-on cover) instead
of plastic. On the other hand, it was quite silent during operation, even with
four drives going at full tilt. If you can overlook those deficiencies though,
the DS412+ is for all intents and purposes a very capable NAS.
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Specifications
§ USB
Interface: 2x USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0, 1x eSATA
§ Power
Consumption: 44W (Access); 15W (HDD Hibernation)
§ Disk
Interface: 4x SATA (Hot Swap Enabled)
§ Max
internal capacity: 16TB (4 x 4TB) // RAID Modes RAID 0, 1, 5, 5+Spare, 6, 10,
and JBOD
§ Dimensions:
165 x 203 x 233.2mm
§ Weight:
2.03kg
§ Website:
www.synology.com
At a glance
§ Processor:
Intel Atom D2700 (2.13GHz)
§ Storage:
4x SATA
§ Memory:
1GB DDR3 (Expandable to 3GB)
§ Network:
2x Gigabit Ethernet
Verdict: 9.0
§ Physique:
9.0
§ Features:
8.5
§ User-friendliness:
8.0
§ Performance:
9.0
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