Synology DS1815+ 8-bay Intel Rangeley SMB NAS Review
by Ganesh T S on November 18, 2014 6:30 AM ESTMiscellaneous Aspects and Final Words
In order to keep testing consistent across all 8-bay units, we performed all our expansion / rebuild testing as well as power consumption evaluation with the unit configured in RAID-5. The disks used for benchmarking (Western Digital WD4000FYYZ) were also used in this section. The table below presents the average power consumption of the unit as well as time taken for various RAID-related activities.
| Synology DS1815+ RAID Expansion and Rebuild / Power Consumption | ||
| Activity | Duration (HH:MM:SS) | Avg. Power (W) |
| Single Disk Init | 0:10:42 | 32.14 W |
| JBOD to RAID-1 Migration | 11:17:58 | 42.34 W |
| RAID-1 (2D) to RAID-5 (3D) Migration | 35:53:15 | 51.68 W |
| RAID-5 (3D) to RAID-5 (4D) Expansion | 25:1:4 | 62.48 W |
| RAID-5 (4D) to RAID-5 (5D) Expansion | 23:32:53 | 73.78 W |
| RAID-5 (5D) to RAID-5 (6D) Expansion | 23:6:12 | 84.07 W |
| RAID-5 (6D) to RAID-5 (7D) Expansion | 24:28:29 | 94.58 W |
| RAID-5 (7D) to RAID-5 (8D) Expansion | 27:7:26 | 104.72 W |
| RAID-5 (8D) Rebuild | 14:21:12 | 103.44 W |
The graphs below show the power consumption and rebuild duration when repairing a RAID-5 volume for the various 8-bay NAS units that have been evaluated before.
Even though the DS1815+ is not as power efficient as the DS1812+, the unit turns out to be better by a huge margin thanks to the cut-down in the rebuild duration. That said, it does look like Synology can optimize RAID rebuild and expansion durations further.
Concluding Remarks
The SMB / SOHO / prosumer COTS NAS market is interestingly poised. With the previous generation Atom platforms, NAS vendors had to differentiate themselves with the software. However, with their 22nm silicon, Intel has provided them with multiple options. We have already looked at QNAP using Bay Trail-D with extra focus on the multimedia transcoding and virtualization aspects. Asustor has opted to go the Haswell route, with a Core i3 CPU for the 70-series. With the DSx15+ series, Synology has placed its bets on the Intel Rangeley platform.
The new Rangeley platform has made up for the drawbacks of the previous generation x86 platforms at this price point. Equipped with the Atom C2538, the DS1815+ excels in three areas: multi-client performance, encryption capabilities and power efficiency. Synology's DSM is quite mature and it has no problems in bringing out the potential of Intel's Rangeley for the NAS market. The latest version of DSM brings deeper cloud integration (more cloud vendors supported for backup), better sync control, an advanced multi-platform note-taking solution in Note Stations / DS Note and improved security features (such as digital signing for packages). For the SMB market that Synology is targeting with the DS1815+, DSM 5.1 also brings SSD caching to high-availability clusters, VMware VAAI for NFS (in addition to the already existing iSCSI support) and scheduled iSCSI LUN snapshots.
Multi-client performance in terms of average response times is better because of the highly integrated I/O compared to other solutions which use bridge chips and have bottlenecks in connecting to the CPU. The appearance of AES-NI in the Atom-class SoCs has finally delivered power efficient encryption capabilities. Obviously, the 22 nm fabrication process as well as tight I/O integration greatly help in reducing the power consumption of the platform compared to other solutions in the market.
The above advantages aside, there are certain areas where Synology could improve:
- The DS1815+ needs to ship with 4 GB of RAM by default. Users running multiple apps would benefit tremendously.
- Even though the iSCSI feature set is quite advanced and ahead of the competitors, performance for the 'multiple LUNs on RAID' case could do with some improvement
- In terms of hardware / chassis design, a USB port (even 2.0 would suffice) on the front would be nice to have.
At $1050 for a diskless unit, the pricing is not unreasonable (given the premiums usually associated with Synology units). The Atom C2538 is one of the more powerful Rangeley SoCs and it helps the DS1815+ pack quite a punch for the SMB / SOHO market. We will shortly be reviewing a couple of 8-bay NAS units from other vendors. They will help us get a better understanding of where the DS1815+ stands when contemporary NAS units are taken into consideration.
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JeffFlanagan - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
I was looking into an NAS for media storage on my home network and concluded that I was much better off hooking up a bunch of 4TB USB drives to a low-power PC, because the PC can also do things an NAS can't, like running Plex Server well. With USB 3.0 it's just as fast as internal storage.SlackMasterDoug - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
Just FYI you can run plex on any x86 based Synology. I have it on my DS1512+ and it works just fine.This isn't supposed to be the cheapest option. As other comments have pointed out, this is for the person that just wants it to work with minimal care and feeding. I've set up plenty of freeNAS solutions that would be cheaper to build than what I have with my Synology. However, the ability to do basically nothing but updates for the past 2.5 years and have it all work is worth it. Plus its all self contained, uses little energy and is quiet.
SirGCal - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
Ya, I'm all for doing it yourself anyhow but these Syn boxes can Plex without an issue. They cannot however do some of the other things I use them for but that's another topic a bit outside the scope of all this. Still your own rig can potentially do more and be more useful and obviously cheaper so if it works for you, that's the whole point. Sweet.peterfares - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
You and most people other than those who have a weird obsession with Synology.RandomThis - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
I always wonder if these "not worth the money, I can build one for 1/x the price" are troll posts, or if people are seriously comparing items the consumer can expect to just buy, plug in and use, versus something they have to research, build and maintain. When I buy synology units I don't pay $1000+ for the hardware, I pay for people to research and develop a solution that works out of the box in a form factor that I find appealing, that takes 10 seconds of my time to maintain. If I didn't work, didn't have kids, and had nothing better to do, I would keep building custom FreeNAS units. As things stand, I buy synology units instead.As for the "I can set up a custom solution in 30 minutes", No. Factor in the time you spend researching the hardware, OS, software, just to mention a few. And the first time you run into a problem in FreeNAS, prepare to put aside a few hours. Admittedly, I had a lot of fun when I put together my FreeNAS unit, however now my time is much too precious to waste on something as minor as NAS units. When I had free time to spare, I was not Synology's target market. Now I am.
Mech049 - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
I always wonder if these "not worth the money, I can build one for 1/x the price" are troll posts, or if people are seriously comparing items the consumer can expect to just buy, plug in and use, versus something they have to research, build and maintain. When I buy synology units I don't pay $1000+ for the hardware, I pay for people to research and develop a solution that works out of the box in a form factor that I find appealing, that takes 10 seconds of my time to maintain. If I didn't work, didn't have kids, and had nothing better to do, I would keep building custom FreeNAS units. As things stand, I buy synology units instead.As for the "I can set up a custom solution in 30 minutes", No. Factor in the time you spend researching the hardware, OS, software, just to mention a few. And the first time you run into a problem in FreeNAS, prepare to put aside a few hours. Admittedly, I had a lot of fun when I put together my FreeNAS unit, however now my time is much too precious to waste on something as minor as NAS units. When I had free time to spare, I was not Synology's target market. Now I am.
And to answer those "oh, your time is worth $800 for the time it takes to put together a NAS", Yes. That's the amount of money I would need to be paid to do something I do not have an interest in doing. Add the fact I wouldn't be spending time with my kids, and $800 is a very good deal.
Mech049 - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
Apologies for the double post. Wouldn't stop loading when I tried to post on my iPad so I tried to post using my PC. Of course it posted on both devices... Mods please combine, or delete the first post if possible.edward1987 - Monday, February 1, 2016 - link
It is better to have a tool dedicated for purpose. Computer is like: what fits everything fits nothing. You get support , upgrades and cool functionality from Synology. Plus if you talk directly to SPAN dot COM you can get better deal than elsewhere!DanNeely - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
For the encryption performance graph, putting the non-encrypted performance numbers would be helpful. Not a huge deal with this one since there was minimal impact; but being able to see how large the penalty is without having to switch back and forth would be helpful on reviews of less capable models.And like I've commented previously; with current generation NASes growing from just boxes of disk drives into light weight general purpose servers as well, your tests really need to be expanded to capture at least some of that capability. I'd suggest running a web server and measuring how much light traffic on that impacts the rest of the devices performance and virtualization hosting abilities for models that offer it (still just QNAP?) at a minimum.
vLsL2VnDmWjoTByaVLxb - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
USB3 has CPU overhead far greater than any built-in storage overhead, isn't RAID aware, suffers from serious latency issues in comparison to SATA, and eats up a port that could be used for peripheral use. USB3 should be used for removable access primarily, and nearline storage secondarily.Not saying you are doing it wrong, but USB3 doesn't scale after the second disk is added. That's a serious problem.