Synology DS1511+ Diskless System DiskStation Scaleable Network Storage for SMB Users

Pros: I wanted to at least put my intials thoughts on here about this product. Overall I'm really pleased. The instructions are very clear about getting the unit it up and going. It recognized the drives without issue. I have used several other lower quality nas units and in short this blows them away. The interface is very impressive! I'm not sure the technical way they do it but you are basically working in a simplified linux GUI. Very easy to use and the layout is very intuitive. I used SHR format instead of RAID 5, hope that isn't an issue for me down the road but I didn't see a downside and after about 20 minutes of formatting I was able to write to the disk (it did parity checks in the background). 3x 2TB disk.

Cons: The only real downside is the price. It not cheap, but I would say it is easily twice as good as any other NAS I've used so I guess you get what you pay for.

Other Thoughts: Numerous features, I'm looking forward to playing with this thing some more!

Pros: I originally had the Drobo FS and had a difficult time setting it up and getting the throughput to be reliable. I returned it and purchased the DS1511+. I'll tell you what, the OS on this thing is awesome! The Synology folks seem to have thought of everything for thier prodcuts. I have three 2tb drives in my NAS for a total of 3.5TB of RAID5 storage. Drives are easy to plug and play. Set up was a little diificult from a Mac (see cons), maybe it was because of what I was running on my system. Anyway, delegating permissions, sharing volumes and the information panels are easy to navigate and great to use. I use the audio station daily to stream music to my computer at work and my iphone while I'm travelling. Remote management features on ios devices is great to have.

Cons: I would say that if you were moderately technical you could figure this out, otherwise you may have a problem with the documentation. I had an issue trying to get my Mac to recognize the DS1511+ on my network during the initial setup. It may be because of the firewall or virus scan I had running on there. I was able to easily run the installer from my LINUX box. Wish there was redundant power supplies.

Other Thoughts: Going to buy additional drives to bump the storage capacity up, just have to wait until drive prices drop.

Pros: Best price I've seen on Newegg. Shipped and arrived promptly as always, thanks Newegg! Make sure you download the latest DSM 4.0+ from the website to install on the unit. I configured mine with link aggregation (you need a switch that supports this) and have the DX510 expansion module as well. Works beautifully.

Cons: It wasn't free?

Other Thoughts: For those of you interested in security, I created a LUN for "MY Documents" connected to my Win7 PC as an iSCSI disk. Using that I was able to configure TrueCrypt to encrypt the contents of the disk. Note you cannot do this with a network mapped drive.

Pros: Easy setup, lots of drive options for any budget, good performance for small business environment. Very expandable.

Neat 3rd party applications

Cons: none as of yet

Pros: Reliable. Many features. Regular software updates. Constantly expanding list of supported accessories.

I've had both the 1010 and the 1511, and love them both. I started with a Drobo FS but could never get anything over 20MB/s; both the 1010 and the 1511 always get over 100MB/s on a gigabit network.

Remote access is great though I had a little trouble in the beginning getting all the ports forwarded that I needed.

Forum is active and helpful.

Cons: Pricy. For the novice or nontech person, they may be overwhelmed by all the options.

Other Thoughts: Looking forward to seeing what 4.0 OS is capable of. And maybe purchasing an 8 bay device in the future if my budget can afford it.

Pros: I have been buying computers and peripherals since 1980 and this the most useful device I've ever come across.

I have multiple PCs to keep track of and my Windows 2003 Server is slow and out of space. It served me well for many years but I have large files scattered all over the place and wanted to consolidate them in one location. The two main considerations were speed and capacity; the DS1511+ comes out on top for both. I get a consistent 70-80MB/sec over the network connection and it's more than twice as fast as the Windows 2003 Server connection. I also have a DS211j that will be used as backup to the DS1511+. Hard drive backup is good but I wanted to back up the DS1511+ hardware as well.

Setup was fairly easy. I installed 5 Samsung F4 2TB 5400rpm drives. The box took control on start up and, after 7.5 hours of checking the drives for errors and creating the RAID5 system, I was ready to go.

Cons: None--just make sure you use Jumbo packets on your computer and that your router/hub supports them.

Other Thoughts: Since RAID5 uses one drive for parity files and the DSM 3.2 software takes some space, I wound up with 7.2TB of usable disk capacity for my files. I took me five days to copy files from the various PCs and the old server. I assigned individual folders to each user with access control options for one or more users. Memory usage during file server activity never went beyond 20%.

The DS1511+ is well worth the money. It's very fast and easy to manage; it's about the size of a 4-slice toaster, is quiet and saves power when idle.

Pros: Features, expandable storage capacity

Cons: Horrible Technical Support!

Synology added some new features in their latest software package DSM 3.2, but forgot to create a manual to avoid question related to newly available settings. So we tried to contact Synology support and get some answers...

Our Impression:
Synology offers the worst Technical support we have ever seen... It looks like it is a one man show tech support and representative didnt even want to spend time on the phone answering any questions, instead we were asked to create a ticket and communicate over email... why list a support number then?
After multiple emails back and forth, numerous screenshots and wasted time we still dont have a resolution for the question we had.

Other Thoughts: Unless you are 100% sure you will not need a tech support, it's a nice product... otherwise think twice.

Pros: lots of features: downstation, photostation. I am still exploring them after 2 months. Web interface is nicer than that of my old Thecus N4100pro. Much better performance too.

Cons: pricey. Instruction manual looks overwhelming at first.

Other Thoughts: Instruction manual is long. A quick start guide would be helpful.

Pros: Great Price. Easy to setup, configure and install. This really fits the bill nicely to substitute for a more pricey SANs for a smaller business that virtualzes it's servers. Just bought my second one for another business, and a 5-bay expansion unit.

Cons: Western Digital GREEN drives have problems working in it.

Pros: Just works. Great software, lots of features. Fun to setup. Quiet, cool, smaller than I thought it would be.

Very fast, with 2 drives (1 green drive, 1 desktop drive) in raid 0, I get a solid 100MB/s (reading and writing) over gig network. 2 Drives in SHR, I get about the same. These are speeds through smb shares. iScsi speeds (file based) were actually lower, not by much though. These speeds are pretty much spot with synology's reported spec, so there was no let down there.

Cons: Expensive. About 100 bucks more than I wanted to pay for a NAS. Seemingly cheap case construction.

Other Thoughts: I was weighing this product against a manually built server. Eventually decided it would cost more, in terms of time ,to setup the manually built server. So far it's been worth every penny.