Synology DiskStation DS1520+ 5-bay NAS

Synology’s DiskStation DS1520+ is the sole 5-bay member of the Plus series. Powering the NAS is an Intel Celeron J4125 quad-core processor clocked at 2GHz (2.7GHz burst) backed by 8GB of DDR4 memory, the maximum amount of memory supported by the motherboard.

Built into the base of the NAS are a pair of NVMe supporting M.2 SSD slots for high speed caching purposes. Having these two dedicated slots of cache drives means that you don't have to give up any of the main storage capacity to make use of Synology's caching technology.

On the back of the NAS are a pair of eSATA ports that you may feel are a little of place on a modern NAS but they are the answer if you begin to run out of main storage capacity (at the time of writing the DS1520+ supports drives up to 16TB). This because the DS1520+ can support a pair or Synology’s DX517 Expansion Units which provides an additional 5 drive bays each of storage capacity (80TB capacity at the time of writing) to the NAS, meaning that you can add another 160TB of storage in total, which should be enough to keep you going for a while.

With all four Gigabit LAN ports connected in Link Aggregation mode, Synology quote Sequential throughput figures for the DS1520+ at 451.25MB/s for reads and 451.34MB/s for writes. We tested it with a single Gigabit connection and got an average of 118.8MB/s for both reads and writes for the five array types (RAID 0,1,5,6 & 10) that we built the hard drives in for testing.

Synology’s NAS OS is DiskStation Manager (DSM), one of the better NAS operating systems out there. Fast to install and feature-rich it uses clearly labelled icons to display the large range options you can choose from. There are two ways of tackling what the software has to offer. The Basic main and control panel pages offer quick and easy access to the basic features making it easier for the first time user to find what they need and feel comfortable with.

However, should you want to delve in deeper to the OS to find out all it offers then the Advanced main and control panel pages have many more options to choose from.

We found the Synology DiskStation DS1520+ on Span.com for £730.80 (inc VAT) HERE

Pros

• DSM OS.
• Overall performance.
• NVMe M.2 SSD slots.
• Expandability options for storage.

Cons

• USB 3.0 ports only.
• Only a maximum of 8GB of memory supported.

Kitguru says: Synology’s DiskStation DS1520+ is a powerful, flexible 5-bay NAS for the home or office. With a pair of dedicated M.2 NVMe slots for caching duties, four Gigabit Ethernet ports and the ability to add a whole lot more capacity via a pair of expansion units should the need arise, it will able to keep pace with demand as an office environment grows for quite some time.

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