Synology DiskStation DS416slim review

Intel’s NASPT (NAS Performance Toolkit ) is a benchmark tool designed to enable direct measurement of home network attached storage (NAS) performance. NASPT uses a set of real world workload traces (high definition video playback and recording, video rendering/content creation and office productivity) gathered from typical digital home applications to emulate the behaviour of an actual application.

We’ve used some of the video and office apps results to highlight a NAS device’s performance.
HD Video Playback
This trace represents the playback of a 1.3GB HD  video file at 720p using Windows Media Player. The files are accessed sequentially with 256kB user level reads.
4x HD Playback
This trace is built from four copies of the Video Playback test with around 11% sequential accesses.
HD Video Record
Trace writes an 720p MPEG-2 video file to the NAS.  The single 1.6GB file is written sequentially using  256kB accesses.
HD Playback and Record
Tests the NAS with simultaneous reads and writes of  a 1GB HD Video file in the 720p format.
Content Creation
This trace simulates the creation of a video file using both video and photo editing software using a mix of file types and sizes. 90% of the operations are writes to the NAS with around 40% of these being sequential.
Office Productivity
A trace of typical workday operations. 2.8GB of data made up of 600 files of varying lengths is divided equally between read and writes. 80% of the accesses are sequential.
Photo Album
This simulates the opening and viewing of 169 photos (approx 1.2GB). It tests how the NAS deals with a multitude of small files.

Despite the low powered CPU and a modest amount of memory, the DS416Slim shows a fairly decent level of performance across all the NASPT video tests with the exception of the HD Video Playback test using SSD's in a RAID 10 array where the performance dips somewhat alarmingly.

When it comes to dealing with everyday workloads the DS416 Slim handles them without too much difficulty although it does begin to struggle when dealing with the many small files of the office productivity test when in RAID 5 and 6 arrays.

The same can be said for the multi file/file type Content Creation test. It does however show good consistency across all types of array when faced with opening multiple small files in the Photo test.

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