SMB Storage Solution: Synology DiskStation DS1511+ NAS

Paul Mah praises the intuitive Synology DiskStation Manager software interface and explains why this product makes sense as a main office storage platform for SMBs.

"Network Attached Storage (NAS) specialist Synology earlier this week announced the release of a new, improved DiskStation to succeed the flagship DS1010+ from its business class line of NAS. The DiskStation DS1511+ chassis comes with five hot-swappable drive bays that can be packed with five 3TB hard disk drives for a total 15TB capacity. Should that prove insufficient, however, businesses can purchase up to two more DX510 enclosures in order to add another 10 hard disk drives (5x HDD per DX510) for an additional 30TB of storage.

I previously reviewed the lower-end DS210+ NAS here, which gave excellent value for small and branch offices. In contrast, the DS1511+ was designed and built to handle much heavier loads, and is probably well-suited as the main office storage for most SMBs. According to the DS1511+ product page, the appliance is capable of delivering blistering 165MB/sec write speeds and 197MB/sec read speeds via its dual Gigabit Ethernet ports with RAID and link aggregation enabled. The presence of another four USB 2.0 ports and two eSATA ports rounds off on the connectivity front."