[Brian]

This past summer, we spent some time with Synology's DiskStation DS410j, a 4-bay NAS generally geared toward small business and home users. Today we're reviewing the DS411+, also a 4-bay unit, but this time with a Dual Core processor, four times the RAM and a black case that shows it's ready for the duties required in an active business environment or use as a high-end media streaming hub. With full support for 3TB drives, the DiskStation DS411+ can support up to 12TB of internal disk space and under RAID 5 can generate 112.99 MB/sec reads and 103.07 MB/sec writes.

Full Review

[xmeister]

Thanks for the review since I'm tossing up between QNAP or Synology.

However it's not quite apples to apples comparing it to the QNAP 459 Pro+. First the QNAP has a 1.8ghz Atom and more importantly costs a lot more.. here in Australia almost 30% difference. Looking at Amazon for US prices there is a similar differential.

Also your graphing comparison doesn't quite work as it does with normal drive comparisons. In the read/write comparisons it appears the Synology beats the stuffing out of the QNAP in a lot of the write comparisons but the QNAP does similar in reads, so it's hard to compare.

While the bottom line the QNAP is faster in reading, if you are doing a lot of writing in certain configs the Synology might be a better choice, and you can buy a fully loaded Synology (ok, maybe 4x1.5TB) for same price as the empty QNAP 459 Pro+.

[Brian]

Fair feedback. I think in the end, we find the Synology so much easier to set up that it's the clear winner. The review of the 459 Pro+ will be up this week hopefully.

[AirBubbles]

Thank you very much for the review, it's especially useful that you've covered the initial installation.

I agree with xmeister that the performance test results could be shown better. In a home setting (games, media), one would value fast reads much higher than fast writes. Perhaps in business use there is more balance. I wonder if the performance results can be weighted for home use/business use.

And a suggestion for manufacturers, it would be very useful if these devices would report some statistics charts (read vs write volume), and offered options to optimize the unit's behaviour for reads, writes or compromise.

[Brian]

I think it's tough for the manufacturers as the performance depends a good deal on the drives inside. I suppose you could ask them to do various iterations of RAID tests against several different drive arrays, but it's a lot of work and if they don't all test the same way with the same drives, you may not get the results you desire. I get the point though and we'll continue to evolve our tests as we work with more of these units.