Synology DS916+ Four-Bay Consumer NAS Review

Introduction

In late 2014, Synology launched the DS415+, a unit aimed at small businesses that wanted high availability along with data redundancy without sacrificing performance. This unit was quickly followed up with a second four-bay unit for consumers dubbed the DS415play. The 415play was a media powerhouse powered by the latest Intel Atom CE5335 with hardware transcoding but was held back by its dual-core architecture and 1GB of memory.

With all the recent NAS launches, we have seen quite a bit of Intel's Braswell platform being deployed. For the most part, these solutions have been based on either the Celeron N3050 or N3150, but Synology, with the DS916+, has taken things a bit further. Instead of cutting costs and going for the budget SoCs, they have deployed one of the latest to come from the Braswell refresh just a few months back, the Pentium N3710. Much of the focus with the DS916+ is aimed at professionals and high productivity, but this unit also takes advantage of scalability with expansion support via the DX513.

Getting right down into the specifications, you can see I have a comparison going from the DS415+ and DS415play to the DS916+. While this new solution may not be a direct replacement for either, it's powerful enough to take the place of both. As you can see, we have a large upgrade going from an Atom to the latest Pentium SoC while memory too has an option now for 8GB.

The DS916+ is also the first four-bay to support 4K encoding at 30FPS whereas the previous only supported 1080p at 30FPS. Drive bays stay the same across all unit but the 916+ does support both the DX213 and DX513 expansion units. As far as external connectivity goes, the DS916+ does away with all USB 2.0 ports and instead is outfitted with three USB 3.0 ports and a single eSATA.

MSRP of the Synology DS916+ with 2GB DDR3 comes in at $599.99 while the 8GB model we have in house retails for $649.99, and both include a three-year warranty.