Synology DiskStation DS1515+ NAS Review

If you are in need of a five bay NAS for your home office or small business, the crew at Overclockers Club say the Synology DiskStation DS1515+ could be just what you are looking for.

All I can say after doing this review is that the Synology is all that anyone could ever want in a NAS. As a security engineer, I appreciate all of the features that the NAS offers to keep your data safe with the encryption, shared logins, and more. From a networking standpoint, the quad NIC ports that offer load balancing and redundancy are huge. Tie that in with the DS1515+'s support for VMware and Hyper-V for storage and I am sold.

I have been using this product in my department since April of this year. I have 4 of the 5 bays loaded with Seagate 5TB Enterprise drives and have had nothing but excellent things to say. I have a 1 drive fault tolerance with the 4 drives. I will be adding a 5th drive soon. Great product, Great network speeds and the drives have been flawless so far. Its been on 24/7 since i set it up. We keep our patrol, investigative, and general videos on it. Also set up on our domain with ease.

I highly recommend this product for any business looking for storage needs.

I've been using this as well for a centralized file storage appliance at home. Loaded it up with 2x4TB ST4000VN0001 (Seagate Enterprise NAS) drives in SHR Single Disk Fault Tolerance (RAID 1) and it fly's! My network is the bottleneck as when writing sequential files, I write at a good 110-120 MB/s. Great box, highly recommended. Love how I can access my files from anywhere over the internet without doing very much.

I have a a 12 bay Synology as well as an older 4 bay model, both work great, no issues over the years, no complaints. Solid products that just work.

Wish the hardware was better. Combine qnap hardware and synology software and you have a killer product.

I made my own XPEnology box from a spare desktop system, a 4 port NIC and 8 SATA hard drives. The chassis isn't as sexy, but it has much more RAM and processing power than most of the Synology boxes that I couldn't afford otherwise...

OregonLAN said:

I made my own XPEnology box from a spare desktop system, a 4 port NIC and 8 SATA hard drives. The chassis isn't as sexy, but it has much more RAM and processing power than most of the Synology boxes that I couldn't afford otherwise...

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I looked into XPEnology. The problem with going that route is an update could brick the system. So with every update you need to check what others have experienced first. I had plans to buy an HP Gen 8 microserver load XPEnology but went with a 713+. I know people use qnap hardware as well.

Overall, I am happy with my aging DS713+. Though, I am limited to my 2x 4tb hdds and at some point I will look into the 4 or 5 bay units. With the 713 I upgraded the RAM from 1GB to 2GB.

I have an 1815+ at home with (8) 6TB reds in (1) RAID 6 volume, backed up daily to an older (4) bay unit with (4) 6TB reds in JBOD. Also keep (1) shelf spare on hand. Use it to mainly store vintage snuff films and Disney Remuxes. I access it remotely through a VPN served at the router. These boxes are expensive for what they are but have a small footprint and don't require any babysitting. Disable auto firmware updates and wait at least 2 weeks before checking the forums to see if it's safe to update.

I've been running a DS411 for a few years now, just started taking full advantage of the 4 bays over the past year after I setup a Plex server. The thing is rock solid. Besides having to go in and update to new firmware versions the thing requires basically no attention. It just runs. Upgrading the SHR array is a breeze too. The only negative for the 411 is it's a bit underpowered for doing any sort of modern media processing.

At some point I'd like to upgrade to the 1515+ so I can go to 2 disk redundancy without sacrificing max space (bluray rips take up a lot of space) and get the quad nic setup. Should be a nice performance boost too.

I got a DS1515+ a couple of months ago. Such an easy setup. So much easier to use than rolling my own system. Although it is pricey, it does make things a lot easier.