Synology DS620slim Gigabit NAS Review

Networking 64 Page 14 of 14 Published by

teaser

Final Words & Conclusion

Conclusion

The trend for NAS units this year will be two-fold, a move towards NAND storage based NAS units and of course Multi- GigE 2.5/5 and 10 GB/sec connections. We predict that the first one will be more trendy, and in the years to come multi-GigE. Hardware then, the J3355 dual-Core 2 GHz (burst up to 2.5GHz) processor is capable enough for what it needs to do. Not one moment did we feel a need for more performance and that is a testimony of the Apollo Lake design, that offers decent IPC. The energy efficiency of this NAS surprised me. If we strip the NAS to its bare naked design and insert just one SSD, then the unit idles at roughly 8 watts, with full load performance in the 10 Watt range. Of course, once you add mechanical HDDs the number quickly changes towards a 35~40 Watt range while with SSDs you can half that. The one remark I would make is that 2GB of memory is rather a little memory volume to deal with it. 4Gb would have hed my preference but then again, we didn't run into any memory problems either. So as long as you do not plan to use big MySQL/MariaDB databases and heavy apps, you should be fine. The DiskStation Manager (DSM) operating system software also help there as it is very efficient in memory usage.

Pricing

At the time of writing, this NAS unit is listed with an MSRP of € 489,- or $479 USD with similar prices in EUR. For a consumer that is steep for a NAS unit, for a SOHO/business rather affordable as you do get six bays. Overall we feel that price is too steep for a dual-core / 2 GB NAS server. Then again it does offer 6 storage slots. One benefit is that this is an energy-friendly NAS server and in the end that is going to save you on your power bill as they often run 365/7.  

 

53543_img_8947

 

DiskStation Manager (DSM) operating system

The DiskStation Manager (DSM) operating system overall is friendly to use as a user interface. The operating system feels and works pretty swift and is among the better ones I have seen on the many NAS units we have tested. It ticks the right boxes as we haven't even talked about the amazing software suite that is available to you. The NAS is also a server offering a wide range of features including file-sharing, Usenet download, web applications, download systems, security center and so on. Synology offers a wide variety of smartphone apps so that you can monitor and control your NAS. Mind you that we listed the default application suite in this review, you can download and install many 'other' packages from the web like.

 

Image28

 

Performance

We reached close to full transfer speeds over a single full-duplex Gigabit Ethernet connection. Ethernet will always bring in some performance and lag issues over a network connection, it's plenty fast for all your activities. With large files and a fast enough HDD over a Gigabit connection, you will reach 110~120 MB/sec on read and writes. So for this type of Ethernet connection, really it can hardly go any faster. At a close, to 500 bucks price point, we do fee that Synology should opt to ditch the 2nd LAN connector and go for one faster one, like a 2.5 GigE or even faster jack. Perhaps that is wishful thinking though. See, a NAS you probably expect it to last you at least 5 to 10 years right? Well, by that time you will already have adapted towards 2.5, 5 or 10 GigE connections. In our lab, we already upgraded to 10 GigE, and in pale comparison transferring files 1 GigE feel slow. And yes I do understand that for most people 120 GigE is not even relevant at this point in time, but the industry is slowing moving forward to faster ethernet, and how nice would it have been to see the DS620slim support it. 

Let's talk about Plex baby

This NAS is a bit of a multi-media powerhouse. For those that like to use Plex to play movies and series, here's where that Apollo lake SOC comes in handy. The Plex installation creates a user account called plex, please make sure you give that account raised privileges to your shared directory as on initial usage we noticed Plex would not find any media content. After installing the package, either through Package Manager or manually, you can connect to your new Plex server. This opens up a web browser connecting port 32400. Now create or login to your Plex account.

 

Untitled-1

You can watch movie trailers on the fly over the SoC, and that works out great with up-to a stream or two at roughly 10 Mbps each. Simply install the Plex media server, and on your smart TV use a client, combine and connect the two and the possibilities are fantastic as the unit can transcode HEVC (H.265), H.264, MVC, VP8, VP9, JPEG/MJPEG on the fly up-to Ultra HD. If default operation is not enough for you, the Plex premium service at 5 bucks a month opens up hardware transcoding support which will make the NAS fly. It is a bit shoddy that Plex used that function to make money though. A bit of a miss is the fact that Synology did not think about making this NAS a multi-media player. Why not pop an HDMI connector on there?, with Kodi installed this unit would have been able to play anything thanks to the powerful SoC. Overall though, PLEX works great, even excellent on this NAS.

Flexibility

Here we land at the rest of the features and functions. You'll have your FTP server, you can upload images and music, make slideshows out of it and show it on the web server of the device or watch photos and videos with the help of a software suite on your smartphone. You can stream DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) and this NAS can be automatically discovered by Digital Media Players (DMP), Digital Media Renderers (DMR) and Digital Media Controllers (DMC) allowing Pictures, Music and Video to be shared instantly at any time at home. All DLNA Certified Devices are capable of streaming content instantly from this NAS. You can share files over the internet if you wanted to, and the list goes on and on. Keep in mind though that everything on this box is targeted at consumers and small business users (SOHO). Though you can access the WEB directory and make your own website, control and configuration over, say, the MySQL server we do warn you to take security measures. Make sure you secure your public files with proper Unix/Linux permissions. Thus at least a CHMOD 755 on directories and preferably 644 on files. You can log in to the box through SSH. The application list you can use on this machine is ginormous. Whoever thought of making an NZB/torrent download server inside a NAS box? All possible, it's nearly crazy to witness, how nice is that?

  

Guru3d-recommended

 

Final Words

Priced right the Synology DS620slim could be a really attractive product. While it might not have the most exquisite hardware specifications (dual-core & 2GB RAM), it is very capable of all your requirements. applications will run fast enough thanks to an intelligent OS that will even compress memory. The biggest bottleneck in a NAS is actually the HDD units, slow IO and IOPS can drag down performance significantly. And this is why Synology is slowly making a move towards all 2.5" storage. We currently can see SSDs drop below 10 cents per GB, and as such, it is not too far away from traditional HDDs. The 10 cents per GB SSDs are all TLC and in the future QLC based, however, the technology has advanced so far that it is incredibly reliable storage, and that combined with the insanely low access times and performance NAND flash storage offers, will make this NAS plenty fast and way more energy efficient. In that mindset, it feels the same when upgrading a PC with an HDD towards SSD, massive small file IO bottlenecks all of the sudden is a thing of the past, among that OS perform much faster and swifter. Power consumption is really good for what it is in its base default design. Remember, if you throw in 2.5" HDDs in there your energy consumption goes up relative to using flash NAND based storage. As mentioned a 2.5, 5 or 10 Gbit Ethernet jack would have been nice as in the not too long future we will all make that move. This DS 620slim also does not come with an HDMI 1.4b output that you can use. It would have been nice to be able to install Kodi with the NAS able to playback even Ultra HD and HD audio streams as the SoC certainly can handle it. Though we doubt you'd be placing a NAS unit next to your TV and hey a SmartTV with Plex solves all your needs and requirements there. Our households are getting more and more connected with lots of devices, we feel centralized storage is crucial in your LAN infrastructure without the need to tie yourself to Amazon or Gogole cloud services. Overall we think the ds620slim is fast and feature-rich enough, the price though has us worried a bit as with a dual-core proc and just 2 GB of memory, this probably should be positioned in that 399 range.

Give Synology a visit here

Share this content
Twitter Facebook Reddit WhatsApp Email Print