Pros & Cons
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- Easy administration, particularly of AES-256-encrypted folders and private cloud access.
- Four Ethernet ports.
- Quiet operation.
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- PC backup can be complicated.
- No status-monitor LCD or push-button USB drive backup.
Synology DiskStation DS1515+ Specs
| Connection Type | Ethernet |
| External USB Hard Disk Expansion | |
| Hard Disk Configuration | RAID |
| Media Server | |
| Network Medium | Wired |
| Printer Server | |
| Rack-mount or Standalone | Standalone |
| RAID Level | Other |
| Remote Access | |
| UPnP Capable | |
| Wired Network Speed | 10/100/1000 |
It's not for newbies, but the five-bay Synology DiskStation DS1515+ ($799.99 without drives) is a formidable network-attached storage (NAS) solution for small to medium-size businesses (SMB) with enterprise aspirations. Capable of holding up to 40TB of data (with five 8TB drives) or scaling up to 120TB (with two of Synology's optional DX513 expansion units plugged into the eSATA ports on the back panel), the DS1515+ specializes in rapid access to securely encrypted folders, using the hardware encryption engine built into its quad-core Intel Atom CPU.
And as far as RAID choices go, you can populate the DS1515+ with drives and configure RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, or JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) as you like. We filled our test unit's tool-free drive sleds with five 6TB drives running Synology's Hybrid RAID, which lets you mix drives of different capacities without wasting space. In this 30TB setup, it yielded 21.7TB of storage with one drive's worth of fault tolerance.
View All Design
Not only has Synology named a flavor of RAID after itself, it's carved the ventilation grilles into jumbo company logos on either side of the sturdy 6.2 by 9.8 by 9.2-inch (HWD) black box. Lockable drive sleds keep the front-accessible, hot-swappable drives secure.
Above the drives, each with its own LED activity light, you'll find a Power button and LEDs for status, alert, and the unit's four Gigabit Ethernet connectors. The DS1515+ lacks two features we've seen on more consumer-friendly NAS devices: an LCD status readout and a front-mounted USB port with push button for quickly backing up an external drive to the NAS.
There are four USB 3.0 ports around back, as well as four rear-mounted Ethernet ports that not only provide redundancy, but can also use link aggregation to surpass the speed of a single LAN connection. Also at the rear are the two aforementioned eSATA expansion ports, a Kensington lock slot, and two fans, which can be set to Quiet or Cool mode—the former was virtually silent in our tests. If one fan fails, the other spins up to compensate.
Once the NAS is populated, setup is as simple as connecting it to a Power outlet and your router, then typing find.synology.com into your browser. Entering a username and password at the sign-in screen brings up Synology's control panel, DiskStation Manager (DSM) 5.2. This is a browser-based interface that resembles Windows, with a taskbar and main menu icon at the top of the screen, and widgets below showing information, such as NAS uptime, storage utilization, and CPU and RAM use.
A DSM utility makes it easy to add users and shared folders. Encrypting a folder requires simply clicking a checkbox and entering a long password or key (which you're prompted to save for recovery's sake). There's another checkbox for whether you want to launch the folder at startup.
