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Synology DS1511+ NAS Review

Posted on 1/7/2012 2:12:00 PM

We recently purchased a Synology DS1511+ NAS. It's more expensive than other NAS in the same category. However, knowing how bad it is losing client's footage, we decided to bite the bullet. We are quite happy with this product.

Synology DiskStation 5-Bay Scalable Network Attached Storage DS1511+

I was first looking for a storage device to replace my classic DROBO which is painfully slow. It is for archiving and backup. At times, speed doesn't seem to be a concern for me. It constantly lost it's USB connection until I have to reboot to get it back. Then I came across this Synology DS1511+ recommended by people leaving comments at Amazon DROBO product page. So I decided to give it a try.

Knowing I wasn't getting for direct editing purpose, this NAS surprises me with the transfer speed. I got about 90 to 120MB/s on average when copying files from it to my local RAID.

One of the things I like about Drobo is I can mix and match different hdd capacity to form the array. Synology has the Synology Hybrid Raid (SHR) which do the same. Also, it can support up to 2 drives fail tolerance.

After using DS1511+ for a few days, I have to say..WOW. Solid performance + solid software and hardware. It's intimating with lots of additional features. I still need time to explore them.

Setting up is the most intimating part. I just went through the assistant program and started creating the array. SHR is I'm all after with the flexibility to expand in the future. That's same feature DROBO provided.

It comes with all sort of features such as mail server, web server, FTP, media server, BT and eMule download client and much more. I am still exploring. It's so flexible that it opens many other ideas for me to use it more than just as a storage device.

The next thing for me to try is to have all the AVI files store there and edit directly from NAS. Will try that for my next project.