KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
The DS1511+ is shipped in the same style of packaging as all other Synology products – a plain brown and black box. with a model sticker at the top.
The bundle contains several Cat 6 cables, a power cable, quick start flyer and drive mounting screws for 2.5 inch and 2.5 inch drives. The disc includes software and device specific .pat DSM 3.0 code.
The DS 1511+ is a substantial business oriented NAS, very similar in design to the DS1010+ that we reviewed in September 2010. Without the drives installed it weighs 4.25kg and the measurements are 157 mm x 248 mm x 233 mm. At the top, above the 5 drive bays, is a row of LED indicators and a power button, set to the right.
The ‘Synology' logo is embossed into the chassis on either side, subtle and effective. At the rear we have a power port, dual fan (2x80mm) to ensure high levels of cooling proficiency for five hard drives. Four USB 2.0 ports rest at the side, above two Gigabit Lan ports. There is also a VGA connector and a reset button. At the bottom are two eSATA ports.
These eSATA ports can be used to connect two DX510 units, which house another 5 drives each. A total of 15 hard drives with a maximum size of 3TB each, offering a total of 45TB of storage capacity. KitGuru has already reviewed the DX510 expansion bay, you can read about it over here.
When the outer chassis is removed, the 250w Seasonic power supply can be located on the right side, held in place with a metal support beam. The power cables run across the top of the chassis, feeding the motherboard which is located on the other side.
The system has 1GB of 800mhz DDR 2 RAM installed and can accept 2GB more via an expansion slot, offering a total of 3GB of ram. There is a dual core D525 Intel Atom processor installed which runs at 1.8ghz. There is a plastic layer isolating the motherboard from the side panel, something we noted missing on the DS1010+.
The motherboard is based around the Intel ICH6 southbridge with a 128MB flash module attached for caching and there is a ITE IT871820F controller for interface operations. A Silicon image SiL3132 SATAlink PCI Express to 2-port Serial ATA II Host controller deal with the eSATA interface. Two Intel 82574L gigabit ethernet controllers handle the throughput.
The drive bays are sturdy plastic and are removed by toggling a switch then pulling out via a clip. We can understand Synology using plastic drive bays for the home market, but we still feel that the business audience would prefer these to be metal, much like the QNAP business models. A key locking security system would also make a welcome addition. When all the drive bays are removed, we can see the sata daughtercard which offers data transfer and power delivery. There is also a small fan to the side, actively cooling the processor and surrounding PCB.
Each of the drives are mounted by 3 screws on either side of each drive bay. It is a painless system and only takes a few minutes. Although we are using 3.5 inch drives in these images, the trays also accommodate 2.5 inch units. Drives can be configured in Single Disk, JBOD, RAID 0/ 1/ 5/ 6/ 5+hot spare volumes.
