Product Overview

Synology’s DS3615xs hauls desktop NAS appliances into the big business space as this 12-bay box delivers a big hardware package. It’s certified to support the latest 6TB drives from Seagate and WD and so offers a maximum capacity of 72TB.

There’s more on the menu as Synology has incorporated the high-speed Infiniband ports from its enterprise rack appliances into the DS3615xs allowing it to support a pair of 12-bay DX1215 desktop expansion units. With two of these units connected you can push the drive count to 36 and raw storage capacity to 216TB.

It’s not short on processing power either as it uses a dual-core 3.4GHz Intel Core i3-4130 CPU. This is teamed up with a decent 4GB of DDR3 ECC memory which can be boosted to 32GB although you will need to replace the existing pair of 2GB modules to achieve this.

The appliance is 10GbE ready as it has an 8X PCI-Express slot which supports Synologys’ adapters and industry standard models from Emulex and Intel. Installation is easy as we only had to remove two screws and the lid to access the slot.

Using the DSM (Disk Station Manager) web interface, we found storage simple to configure. On first contact it runs through a wizard which offered to download the latest DSM version and create a RAID5 array from our drives.
Synology’s Hybrid RAID (SHR) feature has now been removed so you no longer have the option of creating arrays using drives of different makes and sizes. Nevertheless, data protection options are tops as you also have support for dual-redundant RAID6 arrays.

SSD read and write caching for volumes and iSCSI LUNs is supported although two identical SSDs are required for write caches. If you opt for a read cache, the appliance creates a stripe from them and for a read/write cache, it’ll create a mirror.

Backup features don’t get any better as the DS3615xs supports replication and shared folder synchronization with other Synology appliances. Extensive cloud backup options include ElephantDrive, Symform, HiDrive, Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3 and the latter’s low-cost Glacier service.

Synology’s Data Replicator backup software gets its marching orders to be replaced by the Cloud Station app which synchronizes files from your PCs and mobiles and between two Synology appliances. And then there’s the Cloud Sync app which supports all manner of cloud services including OneDrive, box, Google Drive and Dropbox plus it’s a cinch to set up.

Summary

No other vendor can match the DS3615xs for sheer capacity as this is the biggest desktop NAS appliance on the planet. The two design flaws we found knock its scores down slightly but it grabs them back with its huge range of features, massive expansion potential and excellent 10GbE performance.