Play edition has significantly worse CPU and memory is half of the + edition. Not sure if Play is actually capable of performing adequately and + (as far as I know) can also stream through DS Video. The play edition fails at streaming DTS audio correctly so it is useless in that regard anyway.
I was very disappointed by the DS414play´s lack of support for DTS audio and returned it for a DS415+. Why Anandtech recommends the DS414play is something I can´t understand.
Thanks for the review — I've been deliberating over the DS415+ and the DS415play for a few weeks. The big plus with the 415+ is the extra cores and RAM, which means it can 'brute force' transcode 1080p. The 415Play relies on software packages (i.e. not Plex) calling the extra hardware instructions.
One of my criticisms of all the reviews for these NAS product, is we are not getting an idea of the cpu potential of these new chips, beyond a bunch of disk transfer speeds.
As was previously mentioned, you wouldn't go with DS415Play, since the application of it's transcoding hardware is solely limited to DS Video, which means if you want Plex, you need the power of the CPU.
So for instance, one of the features of Plex server is the ability to transcode media ready to be delivered to a tablet, to take away on a trip. So how much quicker is that being delivered, with these newer chips.
Lets look at expanding the reviews away from just disk transfer speeds, since these boxes do so much more than just serve up files.
I completely agree. I understand this particular unit is not aimed at home use, but it would be nice have an overview of what the different ranges of NAS processors are capable of. Right now all the reviews that I have read about these kind of units fail in this regard and an overview of the capabilities of these processors with different plugins for DSM V would be appreciated (disclaimer I'm a big fan of Plex, so I'm particularly interested in this feature).
Has anyone seen a Rangely system designed for networking and not storage? I've been looking for a Silvermont-based mini-system to use for gigabit routing, something with a pair of good Intel NICs, and have come up short. The older Atom systems were bottlenecked well south of a gigabit of throughput.
No, but there are motherboards suitable for this. The SuperMicro A1SAi (Avoton)/A1SRi (Rangeley), ASUS P9A-I, and Gigabyte GA-9 series of motherboards all feature quad GigE off of the integrated i354 Ethernet controller (usually with a Marvell PHY). The high-end SuperMicro boards feature the 8-core C2750/C2758 CPUs, too, and use a passive heatsink (you'll want to make sure your chassis has some kind of internal air circulation). If you're prepared to roll your own, you could build one hell of a server that shouldn't be bottlenecked by the CPU.
The Sophos (nee Astaro) UTM appliance model SG115 has a Silvermont Atom CPU. The price (~$850USD) includes a 1-year unlimited license, but you can get a free home-user license limited to 50 internal IPs if you don't want to renew the license after 1 year. See http://astaro.org for the user support forum.
BTW, I recommend buying from a real reseller rather than an online store, as the reseller can give basic sizing advice, etc., without extra charge.
You haven't stated if you are using Link Aggregation, as the main new feature of this NAS is hardware encryption why do none of your tests top 100MB/s?
I would expect to see figures close to the 220MB/s advertised on the Synology website?
Well, the client side isn't entirely the problem here. You could do LACP on the client side too, and still only see gigabit. Ethernet was never designed to receive frames out of order, and the two interfaces aren't easily syncronised - so traffic between a pair of endpoints is sent over only one link. Fine and dandy for busy networks, poor in this scenario
Two questions I can't find the answers for anywhere:
1) Does the 415+ come with ECC RAM?
2) If not, does it work if you put ECC RAM in it?
One of the key potential benefits of Avoton/Rangeley is support for ECC RAM, but Synology doesn't mention it, and it seems like the kind of thing you'd advertise (or at least list in the specifications) if you used it.
ganeshts: I don't understand this. I'm not saying I don't understand you, or don't believe you. (If I didn't think your answer was possible, I wouldn't have asked the question.) What I am saying is, I don't understand why ECC RAM isn't supported in this model.
From the block diagram under "Platform Analysis", it appears that the memory controller is built into the CPU/SoC, and the C2538 they're using does support ECC RAM. DDR3 SODIMMs are 204-pin whether they're ECC or not, and while it's not really discussed in this review, a teardown on legionhardware.com shows the memory as a single SODIMM module. Since Synology is using an SoC with an integrated ECC-capable memory controller, I can't understand why they would leave out ECC memory support. It seems like it would have to be an active choice on their part not to, in order to discourage people from sticking in ECC RAM on their own. (Synology doesn't like its users upgrading RAM and claims that doing so will void the warranty, which is something the PC industry stopped pulling a decade ago.) All the necessary hardware should be there, right? So why doesn't it work if you just stuck an ECC UDIMM in there? Did Synology actively disable this feature of the SoC?
While dimensions and sockets for DDR3 and ECC DDR3 modules are physically the same, they've got different electrical layouts! Inserting regular memory module into ECC DDR3 equipped board would result in damaged memory module and possibly the board.
As why Synology chose not to use ECC memory (despite they could have), Ganesh already answered that.
Chubbypanda: Thanks for your reaponse, it put me on the right track.
I was about to say that I don't buy this, since both ASUS and SuperMicro make Avoton boards that are listed as taking both ECC and non-ECC RAM. But on a closer look, only the SuperMicro mATX boards (which have full-size 240-pin DIMM sockets) claim to support both ECC and non-ECC RAM. Their mini-ITX boards (which have 204-pin SODIMM sockets) support ECC RAM only. The missing pins in SODIMMs must be ones that would allow cross-compatibility (probably by providing separate electrical signals for ECC and non-ECC RAM, at least for detection at startup).
I think that's it. Since the Synology unit uses SODIMMs, it can only support one or the other, and they chose non-ECC. Boo. If (as jabber mentioned) they release a higher-end version with ECC RAM, I'll buy it... If I haven't given up waiting for it and built myself a FreeNAS box. I had been waiting and hoping for the inevitable Avoton Synology box, but I hadn't anticipated this.
Does this (or any NAS that you know of) support simultaneous access from both the USB port as well as over the network? I understand the "only one interface can control the storage at one time" issue, but I'm really hoping someone is working to overcome this, even if it means that one of those interfaces is locked into read-only mode.
The USB ports are host ports, i.e, storage devices or WLAN USB sticks can be connected to it. The USB port can't be used to connect to a PC for using the unit as a DAS (direct-attached storage).
Seriously, articles with graphs showing two aspects of the same thing (e.g. rebuild times in this case) need to be shown on an X-Y chart, so that the trade-offs are immediately and obviously visible.
The same goes for many similar pairs of charts you show in other reviews, e.g. power-vs-noise in GPU or case reviews.
I almost spat coffee all over my monitor when I saw the tertiary drive in the test rig. That is a very expensive way of eliminating the test rig as a performance bottleneck in the tests.
It's about time that transcoding includes h265 support, and be mentioned in reviews. This DS415+ unit may provide this for resolutions up to 1080p. This is for sure not supported by the DS415play, as it won't have the cpu power to do this in sw, but the DS415+ just may do it.
I have quite a movie collection and I am halving the needed storage by transcoding the files from h264 to h265, including all the sub 4k files (which is 100% of them ;-) I may be an early h265 adopter, but the cpu intensive transcoding is worth the effort already. The x265 coder is of such a good quality now (since august at least), that I dare to go for it.
It would be nice to have the DS Video capability to transcode h265 to something suited for current tablets and media players!
It's US Gov Speak (if you follow the link it comes from US Govt Acquisition rules). I suspect it's less generally known than that it appears common in a casual search because US Gov/Contractors collectively represent millions of people.
When there are 4539 iPad Air 2 reviews all saying pretty much the same thing why bother? Why not review something else that enthusiasts might be interested in.
RAID5 for drives this large is calling for trouble. Several enterprise vendors discourage usage of RAID5 for large 7.2k drives because the risk of a second-drive loss (or just effects of bit rot) during a rebuild is just too high.
I am aware that both RAID6 and RAID10 in a four-bay unit mean 50% capacity loss compared to 25% for RAID5, but in the end, it's your personal media archive that's at risk.
So, a comparison of RAID10 and RAID6 speeds would have been nice.
Can someone explain why I7 or xenon based Nas drives are so expensive when the chip is only a few hundred dollars more then these atoms? Wish symbology or qnap would allow custom nas units but with reasonable prices.
You can put a Synology-compatible OS on custom hardware, or use an open source NAS OS like FreeNAS. At least if it's for a home project, not sure I would do this for a commercial project.
I would love to know the answer to this. I need a box that can handle Plex, only 1 stream, at 1080p. Currently I have my big gaming PC with PMS, but I prefer a low power NAS, or a HTPC+NAS with Plex/PMS. Currently I'm debating between this or a custom box with a J1900 quad @ 2Ghz. Prefer the simplicity of Synology and how compact it is, but don't like the price and I'm not sure if it can handle it...
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naxeem - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
Play edition has significantly worse CPU and memory is half of the + edition. Not sure if Play is actually capable of performing adequately and + (as far as I know) can also stream through DS Video. The play edition fails at streaming DTS audio correctly so it is useless in that regard anyway.stbufraba - Sunday, November 2, 2014 - link
I was very disappointed by the DS414play´s lack of support for DTS audio and returned it for a DS415+. Why Anandtech recommends the DS414play is something I can´t understand.Dunkurs1987 - Monday, February 15, 2016 - link
You need to spend time and decide what this NAS really gonna be for- to not regret:http://www.span.com/compare/DS416J-vs-DS416-vs-DS4...
elithrar - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
Thanks for the review — I've been deliberating over the DS415+ and the DS415play for a few weeks. The big plus with the 415+ is the extra cores and RAM, which means it can 'brute force' transcode 1080p. The 415Play relies on software packages (i.e. not Plex) calling the extra hardware instructions.skarnm2 - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
One of my criticisms of all the reviews for these NAS product, is we are not getting an idea of the cpu potential of these new chips, beyond a bunch of disk transfer speeds.As was previously mentioned, you wouldn't go with DS415Play, since the application of it's transcoding hardware is solely limited to DS Video, which means if you want Plex, you need the power of the CPU.
So for instance, one of the features of Plex server is the ability to transcode media ready to be delivered to a tablet, to take away on a trip. So how much quicker is that being delivered, with these newer chips.
Lets look at expanding the reviews away from just disk transfer speeds, since these boxes do so much more than just serve up files.
adboelens - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
I completely agree. I understand this particular unit is not aimed at home use, but it would be nice have an overview of what the different ranges of NAS processors are capable of. Right now all the reviews that I have read about these kind of units fail in this regard and an overview of the capabilities of these processors with different plugins for DSM V would be appreciated (disclaimer I'm a big fan of Plex, so I'm particularly interested in this feature).icrf - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
Has anyone seen a Rangely system designed for networking and not storage? I've been looking for a Silvermont-based mini-system to use for gigabit routing, something with a pair of good Intel NICs, and have come up short. The older Atom systems were bottlenecked well south of a gigabit of throughput.shelbystripes - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
No, but there are motherboards suitable for this. The SuperMicro A1SAi (Avoton)/A1SRi (Rangeley), ASUS P9A-I, and Gigabyte GA-9 series of motherboards all feature quad GigE off of the integrated i354 Ethernet controller (usually with a Marvell PHY). The high-end SuperMicro boards feature the 8-core C2750/C2758 CPUs, too, and use a passive heatsink (you'll want to make sure your chassis has some kind of internal air circulation). If you're prepared to roll your own, you could build one hell of a server that shouldn't be bottlenecked by the CPU.bobbozzo - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
The Sophos (nee Astaro) UTM appliance model SG115 has a Silvermont Atom CPU.The price (~$850USD) includes a 1-year unlimited license, but you can get a free home-user license limited to 50 internal IPs if you don't want to renew the license after 1 year.
See http://astaro.org for the user support forum.
BTW, I recommend buying from a real reseller rather than an online store, as the reseller can give basic sizing advice, etc., without extra charge.
Sonic01 - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
You haven't stated if you are using Link Aggregation, as the main new feature of this NAS is hardware encryption why do none of your tests top 100MB/s?I would expect to see figures close to the 220MB/s advertised on the Synology website?
ganeshts - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
Encryption testing is with a single client. The limitation is on the client side which has only a single GbE link.Reason it is done this way is to make sure we have data that can be compared against other units that have been evaluated before.
thewishy - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
Well, the client side isn't entirely the problem here. You could do LACP on the client side too, and still only see gigabit. Ethernet was never designed to receive frames out of order, and the two interfaces aren't easily syncronised - so traffic between a pair of endpoints is sent over only one link. Fine and dandy for busy networks, poor in this scenarioSonic01 - Tuesday, November 4, 2014 - link
Makes sense, it's a shame you guys don't test this as some of us might be using a client or server configured with link aggregation.I've purchased this NAS, a LAG capable switch and network card for my desktop and server, will see what kind of performance I get...
xenol - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
Gallery: Gallery Title!I laughed harder than I should at that.
shelbystripes - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
Two questions I can't find the answers for anywhere:1) Does the 415+ come with ECC RAM?
2) If not, does it work if you put ECC RAM in it?
One of the key potential benefits of Avoton/Rangeley is support for ECC RAM, but Synology doesn't mention it, and it seems like the kind of thing you'd advertise (or at least list in the specifications) if you used it.
ganeshts - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
Nope, no ECC RAM. The platform may support it, but Synology's board doesn't. At this price point, ECC support is difficult to get.shelbystripes - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
ganeshts: I don't understand this. I'm not saying I don't understand you, or don't believe you. (If I didn't think your answer was possible, I wouldn't have asked the question.) What I am saying is, I don't understand why ECC RAM isn't supported in this model.From the block diagram under "Platform Analysis", it appears that the memory controller is built into the CPU/SoC, and the C2538 they're using does support ECC RAM. DDR3 SODIMMs are 204-pin whether they're ECC or not, and while it's not really discussed in this review, a teardown on legionhardware.com shows the memory as a single SODIMM module. Since Synology is using an SoC with an integrated ECC-capable memory controller, I can't understand why they would leave out ECC memory support. It seems like it would have to be an active choice on their part not to, in order to discourage people from sticking in ECC RAM on their own. (Synology doesn't like its users upgrading RAM and claims that doing so will void the warranty, which is something the PC industry stopped pulling a decade ago.) All the necessary hardware should be there, right? So why doesn't it work if you just stuck an ECC UDIMM in there? Did Synology actively disable this feature of the SoC?
chubbypanda - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
While dimensions and sockets for DDR3 and ECC DDR3 modules are physically the same, they've got different electrical layouts! Inserting regular memory module into ECC DDR3 equipped board would result in damaged memory module and possibly the board.As why Synology chose not to use ECC memory (despite they could have), Ganesh already answered that.
jabber - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
Plus it leaves them open to sell a version in the future that does support ECC and charge you an extra $400 for the benefit.shelbystripes - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
Chubbypanda: Thanks for your reaponse, it put me on the right track.I was about to say that I don't buy this, since both ASUS and SuperMicro make Avoton boards that are listed as taking both ECC and non-ECC RAM. But on a closer look, only the SuperMicro mATX boards (which have full-size 240-pin DIMM sockets) claim to support both ECC and non-ECC RAM. Their mini-ITX boards (which have 204-pin SODIMM sockets) support ECC RAM only. The missing pins in SODIMMs must be ones that would allow cross-compatibility (probably by providing separate electrical signals for ECC and non-ECC RAM, at least for detection at startup).
I think that's it. Since the Synology unit uses SODIMMs, it can only support one or the other, and they chose non-ECC. Boo. If (as jabber mentioned) they release a higher-end version with ECC RAM, I'll buy it... If I haven't given up waiting for it and built myself a FreeNAS box. I had been waiting and hoping for the inevitable Avoton Synology box, but I hadn't anticipated this.
Arkive - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
Does this (or any NAS that you know of) support simultaneous access from both the USB port as well as over the network? I understand the "only one interface can control the storage at one time" issue, but I'm really hoping someone is working to overcome this, even if it means that one of those interfaces is locked into read-only mode.ganeshts - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
The USB ports are host ports, i.e, storage devices or WLAN USB sticks can be connected to it. The USB port can't be used to connect to a PC for using the unit as a DAS (direct-attached storage).rpg1966 - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
Seriously, articles with graphs showing two aspects of the same thing (e.g. rebuild times in this case) need to be shown on an X-Y chart, so that the trade-offs are immediately and obviously visible.The same goes for many similar pairs of charts you show in other reviews, e.g. power-vs-noise in GPU or case reviews.
echtogammut - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
I almost spat coffee all over my monitor when I saw the tertiary drive in the test rig. That is a very expensive way of eliminating the test rig as a performance bottleneck in the tests.Salipander - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
It's about time that transcoding includes h265 support, and be mentioned in reviews. This DS415+ unit may provide this for resolutions up to 1080p. This is for sure not supported by the DS415play, as it won't have the cpu power to do this in sw, but the DS415+ just may do it.I have quite a movie collection and I am halving the needed storage by transcoding the files from h264 to h265, including all the sub 4k files (which is 100% of them ;-) I may be an early h265 adopter, but the cpu intensive transcoding is worth the effort already. The x265 coder is of such a good quality now (since august at least), that I dare to go for it.
It would be nice to have the DS Video capability to transcode h265 to something suited for current tablets and media players!
DanNeely - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
Is the ram soldered to the PCB, or in a dimm that could be swapped out for an ECC module?skarnm2 - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
I did read elsewhere it was soldered. It is on the larger models it's swap-able.chubbypanda - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
Non-ECC and ECC modules aren't interchangeable. Do not attempt!mpbrede - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
Define COTS, please? Some form of "... Off The Shelf"ganeshts - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
Commercial :)I thought it was pretty common usage, and a cursory search online makes me think I may not have been mistaken: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COTS
DanNeely - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
It's US Gov Speak (if you follow the link it comes from US Govt Acquisition rules). I suspect it's less generally known than that it appears common in a casual search because US Gov/Contractors collectively represent millions of people.Laststop311 - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
Beast quad core cpu for a NAS.Morawka - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
where is the ipad air 2 review. you guys even got early review units right? you went to the keynote.jabber - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
When there are 4539 iPad Air 2 reviews all saying pretty much the same thing why bother? Why not review something else that enthusiasts might be interested in.iPads are for baby boomers and your mum and dad.
mexell - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
RAID5 for drives this large is calling for trouble. Several enterprise vendors discourage usage of RAID5 for large 7.2k drives because the risk of a second-drive loss (or just effects of bit rot) during a rebuild is just too high.I am aware that both RAID6 and RAID10 in a four-bay unit mean 50% capacity loss compared to 25% for RAID5, but in the end, it's your personal media archive that's at risk.
So, a comparison of RAID10 and RAID6 speeds would have been nice.
skarnm2 - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
I think you would go with 5+ disk versions for Raid 6.FalconX69 - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
Can someone explain why I7 or xenon based Nas drives are so expensive when the chip is only a few hundred dollars more then these atoms? Wish symbology or qnap would allow custom nas units but with reasonable prices.RockyMcNuts - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
You can put a Synology-compatible OS on custom hardware, or use an open source NAS OS like FreeNAS. At least if it's for a home project, not sure I would do this for a commercial project.http://us.hardware.info/reviews/5525/workshop-xpen...
http://www.avsforum.com/forum/39-networking-media-...
http://xpenology.com/forum/
sin_tax - Saturday, November 1, 2014 - link
Would the more powerful CPU allow this to be a suitable box for Plex Media Server? Can it handle transcoding one or more 1080p streams?asendra - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
I would love to know the answer to this. I need a box that can handle Plex, only 1 stream, at 1080p.Currently I have my big gaming PC with PMS, but I prefer a low power NAS, or a HTPC+NAS with Plex/PMS.
Currently I'm debating between this or a custom box with a J1900 quad @ 2Ghz. Prefer the simplicity of Synology and how compact it is, but don't like the price and I'm not sure if it can handle it...
stbufraba - Sunday, November 2, 2014 - link
Did anyone try DDR3L memory modules in the DS415+?