Synology BeyondCloud Mirror 6TB Consumer NAS Review

Introduction

With many vendors now offering a pre-built NAS storage solution, Synology has emerged with their very own turnkey solution to take on the likes of the Personal Cloud from Seagate and MyCloud from Western Digital. The Beyond Cloud as Synology is calling their latest comes in two flavors both offering the proven DSM NAS platform at the core.

The standard single bay solution carries the BeyondCloud moniker, while the dual or two bay solution we had sent over is setup with two bays and is appropriately named the BeyondCloud Mirror. Several capacity options are being launched at the same time with the single bay version offering both 2TB and 3TB setups, the Mirror or dual bay model is being offered with two 3TB drives for 6TB of raw storage or 3TB mirrored.

The BeyondCloud Mirror is based on the Marvell Armada 370 platform that we have seen in previous NAS appliances. This SoC operates at 800MHz, while being paired together with 256MB of DDR3 memory. Compatible drives range from your standard 3.5" solutions, while 2.5" drives are supported when using Synology's optional disk holder. For a full list of compatible drives, Synology carries a list on their website support. Connectivity ranges from the standard gigabit Ethernet port down to dual USB 2.0 ports. Internal drives use the EXT4 file system, while externals connected to the unit can use everything from HFS+ with volumes smaller than 2TB to FAT, NTFS and EXT3.

With this solution being powered by DSM, we have a maximum volume size of 16TB supporting 256 internal volumes and 10 iSCSI targets. RAID types range from standard RAID modes 0, 1 and JBOD over to Synology Hybrid RAID that allows users to mix volumes sizes while maintaining both data redundancy and performance.

Above, we have the system specifications pulled from the Synology website. As you can see, much of this is what we spoke of above with the Armada 370 SoC at 800MHz and 256MB of DDR3. Towards the bottom, we find mention of 8TB HDD support, allowing the latest storage technology to be used internally.