Introduction

There was a time when Network Access Storage (NAS) devices were reserved purely for the rich or commercial enterprises. Thanks to the stiff competition, globally NAS products have become a standard house-hold electronic item and today you can even find some really basic NAS products for under $150. That said, Synology Inc have been in operation for just over a decade and have managed to become one of the most top rated NAS manufactures in the world. Their products become faster, flexible and more innovative with every new release. We have been fans of Synology products right from their inception and we have first hand experience in the tremendous progress they have achieved to-date.

Our first review of a Synology product was the DS207 and while it’s capabilities were good it’s certainly gratifying to see the maturity their NAS products have reached in present times. Synology offeres a wide range of products from small to large scale enterprises and SOHO environments. Today we take a look at their DS411J 4 bay NAS which is aimed at the SOHO market, so read on as we take an indepth look at how this device performs.

Synology DS411J – An Indepth Look

Synology always maintained good standards with their packaging; the DS411J comes in a white box highlighting its features and capabilities on every side of the box. The DS411J supports 4 drives to enhance the RAID capabilities that can be offered from the device.

Opening up the box you’re offered with a neatly packed DS411J and the smaller box inside holds all the required cables, power adapter, software CD and user manual.

Taking the unit out of the box reveals a very sleek looking DS411J with a white front and a silver aluminum casing. We love the color combination Synology have adopted for the DS411J as it blends well in a modern environment. The front of the DS411J consists of 4xLED indicator lights for HDD activity (1 LED for each hard drive), 1xLED for LAN activity and 1xLED for device status. The stripes on the lower portion you see are ventilation holes to provide good airflow through the system.

Going to the rear of the DS411J you find a power socket, LAN port, a Reset switch and 2x USB ports. Opening the thumb screws you get a clearer picture of all the internals of the DS411J and to ensure your drives remain cool during high workload, the device contains 2x 80mm exhaust fans which is something new from previous models.

Installation:

For easy installation of your hard drives, Synology have included drive trays which can slid in or out of the DS411J. This really makes installation a breeze and all you have to do is secure the drive onto the tray with the supplied screws.

You would have noticed that the DS411J package does not contain any SATA cables; this is because none is needed. You install the hard drive onto the drive tray with the rear portion of the hard drive facing the inside of the DS411J. Then when you’re ready, simply insert the drive tray into the DS411J until you feel the drive click into place. There are SATA connectors fixed onto the PCB of the DS411J and all you have to do is make sure the drive connectors slide into the connectors of the PCB. In total the DS411J supports 12TB of data capacity (3TB per drive x 4) which is ample for a SOHO user. Note however that depending on the RAID configuration you choose the actual drive space you get will change. (Example: Should you decide to use mirroring, then your storage capacity will be half of the total 4 drives combined.)

Features

What makes Synology products stand out is their feature rich firmware that integrates well with the internal hardware of their NAS devices. With the sheer gamut of of built in features you can simply convert your DS411J into a feature rich UPnP-compliant media server; stream audio and photos to mobile devices (Apple & Android), host multiple websites, blogs, photo galleries and many more. The firmware we used on the DS411J is the Disk Station Manager 3.2 which is currently the most stable release. Their is a beta 4.0 version released, however we did not install this since it’s in beta phase.

If you want to see the staggering list of features the Disk Station Manager 3.2 offers, just follow this link: http://www.synology.com/dsm/index.php?lang=enu

There is one feature called the “Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR)” which truly caught our eye and I’m certain it’ll interest most of you as well. Traditionally RAID requires one to have equal sized drives or you will end up with the capacity of the lowest capacity drive in your RAID volume if you have dis-similar drives in your RAID setup. Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) is an intelligent volume type that optimizes volume size when combining hard disks of varying sizes into an array. When set as the Custom volume type in Disk Station Manager, SHR provides 1 to 2 hard disks fault-tolerance of data protection. It can be expanded to an optimal volume space when a lager or additional hard disks are inserted into the array.

By using SHR your RAID creation time is also increased dramatically and as per Synology it’s an improvement of almost 95% (A 10 TB volume usually requires approximately 9 and a half hours to complete the entire process, with SHR it only takes around 30 minutes.)

Storage Expansion Made Easy

One of the biggest drawbacks in RAID is its limited scalability. Regardless of large or small your enterprise is scalability becomes particularly important when storage space requirements are high in demand. You don’t know when you will need to expand, and by how much at a time. With the Storage Manager, you can expand the RAID without impacting the volume size – by adding new hard drives to enlarge physical storage space. You can also expand the volume by simply allocating more storage space on the UI, and Disk Station Manager will do the rest for you. Small volumes can be expanded whenever needed by changing the volume size on the fly. With just a few clicks in the Storage Manager, the new, larger volume will be created and ready to use.

If you want to read up more on SHR checkout this link: http://originwww.synology.com/dsm/volume.php?lang=enu

Performance & Conclusion

We performed a few simple file copy and write tests using a couple of large ISO files (4GB Each) and also copying a game folder through FTP which contained large number of small files and few large files.

ISO File Read:36.9 MB/s
ISO File Write:28.4 MB/s

Game Folder Read: 21.6 MB/s
Game Folder Write: 18.2 MB/s
While the read/write performance of the DS411J isn’t earth shattering, it’s decent enough for everyday use in a SOHO environment and you will hardly notice any lag. If you need higher performance you can go for a higher spec-ed NAS, however it won’t come cheap. The DS411J offers mid level performance at a reasonable cost of around US$360, so if you’re on the lookout for a NAS device with reasonable performance that won’t break the bank the Synology DS411J will do you justice.