Synology DS3611xs

Network Attached Storage

By Harley Ogier, Auckland | Monday, 07 November 2011
NAS, or Network Attached Storage, is something we look at often in PC World: Products that can centralise data and share it between multiple PCs and handheld devices are now a major industry.

In many cases, small businesses running systems patched together from off-the-shelf PCs can get away just fine with high-end home NAS solutions to centralise their data. A compact two- or four-bay NAS box for a couple of terabytes of fault-tolerant storage is a perfectly valid and economic solution.

In some industries, however, your data storage requirements can be disproportionately large compared to the rest of your infrastructure. Videographers, photographers, graphic designers and other creative professionals are a prime example: you might have just two or three computers, an equal number of staff, but need to store terabytes of uncompressed video or RAW images in a reliable and quickly-accessible manner.

While experimenting with video editing, we borrowed a Synology DS3611xs 12-bay NAS unit from local distributors VST for some quality hands-on time. The DS3611xs retails for $5,294 incl GST ($4,604 ex), as an empty unit (no drives). Our test model came filled with twelve 750GB drives, for a total capacity of 9TB.
The DS3611xs is a free-standing 310 x 300 x 340mm rectangular NAS, weighing in at 10.5kg without drives. On the front is a power button, some status LEDs and twelve slide-out drive caddies, with a key lock to prevent accidental removal.

Each drive caddy has its own power and activity lights, which are cleverly mounted within the DiskStation itself and simply light-piped to the front of the caddies with plastic tubes. This means the caddies are just completely passive chunks of plastic, reducing the overall complexity of the system. Drives are hot-swappable, though the result of removing any given drive will depend entirely on the RAID setup you’ve chosen.

On the backplate you’ll find two expansion ports, four USB 2.0 ports, and four Gigabit Ethernet connections. With an optional PCI-E expansion card, you can add dual 10-gigabit Ethernet ports for much faster data transfer speeds.

Setup is simple — I opted out of the low-level disk check (in a production situation I’d strongly recommend you endure the several-hour-process) and was able to produce a highly fault-tolerant 4TB RAID 10 volume from my twelve 750GB discs in under five minutes.

In tests with a single PC connected via Gigabit Ethernet, I averaged write speeds of 106MByte/sec, and read speeds of 91MByte/sec when dealing with mid-sized (100MB) files. Dealing with collections of 2,500 x 1KB files, I saw averages of 193KByte/sec write, and 218KByte/sec read. That’s six times the average read and write speeds achieved by the home NAS units in our last roundup. Part of that speed increase can be explained by our RAID setup, but the Synology is reponsible for most of it.

You configure and manage the unit through Synology’s browser-based DiskStation Manager software, which feels like a full-scale desktop operating system. Essentially that’s what it is — the DS3611xs is a computer with a dual-core 3.1GHz processor a massive amount of disk storage and not much else. It supports PC and Mac through network protocols such as CIFS/SMB, AFP and NFS.

For a small business with big data storage requirements, the DS3611xs could happily serve as an all-purpose central hub. Through DiskStation Manager it supports a huge array of functions including a mail server, FTP, web server, print server, VPN server for secure remote access, a variety of backup services and support for networked surveillance cameras. There's everything you need to run a small business from storage to security to staff intranet.

If your business currently relies on racks of DVDs, or drawers full of old removable hard-drives, consider a NAS device to house all that data in a far more accessible and fault-tolerant manner. Enterprise-class storage doesn’t have to come with a full-on server room at an enterprise-class price.

Synology is distributed in New Zealand through VST Limited.

To see how another Synology NAS product, DiskStation DS1511+, measures up against its competition, read "The Hot Box" on page 18 of this issue.

This review appears in the November, 2011 issue of PC World.