Synology DiskStation DS211+ Review

Written by Antony Leather

August 13, 2011 | 10:29

Tags: #best-nas-box #diskstation #file-server #media-streaming #nas-box #network #network-storage #premium-grade #sharing

Companies: #synology

Testing Methods

Any device connected to a Gigabit LAN will have maximum read and write speeds of 125MB/sec. However, just as the controller chip on an SSD has a huge effect on the drive's speed, the same is also true for NAS boxes. As they’ll be used for storing lots of tiny files, as well as large video files, we used two 5GB folders (one full of small files, and the other packed with large video files), in order to gauge the flexibility of each box.

Our test involves writing to each NAS box separately, and then reading from them. The small file folder was filled with 10,000 files that included photos, Word documents and short videos, while the large file folder comprised three 1.7GB videos.

We installed the same 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F3 hard drive in each NAS box, which was connected to a Netgear Gigabit Ethernet switch for all of the read and write tests. We recorded the time it took to transfer each folder in seconds, and used this result to work out the average transfer rate. You can see the speed test results in the graphs below.


To read and write from the NAS box, we use a PC built around an Asus P7H55-M motherboard, 4GB of Crucial DDR3 RAM and an Intel Pentium G6950 CPU overclocked to 4GHz. To eliminate any reading or writing bottleneck at the PC end, we also use a Corsair X128 SSD.

Once a NAS box is up and running, we then also try out all of the features, such as shared folders, iTunes servers, iSCSI and Bit-Torrent clients, in order to see how easy they are to set up and use on a regular basis. In addition, we also take noise and hard drive temperature into consideration, as well as the build quality.

Performance

Large File Test - Read Speed

Arranged by Transfer Speed

  • Synology DS211+
  • Synology DiskStation DS211j
  • QNAP TS-219P Turbo NAS
  • LG N2B1D
  • Synology DS210+
  • QNAP TS-210 Turbo NAS
  • Synology USB Station 2
  • ZyXEL NSA-220 Plus
  • Icy Box IB-NAS3221
  • Xtreamer eTRAYz
  • 81.9
  • 64.1
  • 43.5
  • 38.6
  • 37.0
  • 35.4
  • 19.0
  • 16.5
  • 15.5
  • 10.0
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
MB/sec Higher is Better

Large File Test - Write Speed

Arranged by Transfer Speed

  • Synology DS210+
  • Synology DS211+
  • Synology DiskStation DS211j
  • QNAP TS-219P Turbo NAS
  • QNAP TS-210 Turbo NAS
  • LG N2B1D
  • Synology USB Station 2
  • Xtreamer eTRAYz
  • Icy Box IB-NAS3221
  • ZyXEL NSA-220 Plus
  • 51.0
  • 45.0
  • 35.1
  • 27.0
  • 22.8
  • 18.2
  • 18.0
  • 13.3
  • 12.7
  • 9.0
0
10
20
30
40
50
MB/sec Higher is Better

Small File Test - Read Speed

Arranged by Transfer Speed

  • Synology DS211+
  • Synology DiskStation DS211j
  • Synology DS210+
  • QNAP TS-219P Turbo NAS
  • QNAP TS-210 Turbo NAS
  • LG N2B1D
  • Synology USB Station 2
  • Icy Box IB-NAS3221
  • ZyXEL NSA-220 Plus
  • Xtreamer eTRAYz
  • 46.3
  • 24.2
  • 22.0
  • 21.1
  • 17.0
  • 15.5
  • 15.0
  • 9.9
  • 9.8
  • 1.0
0
10
20
30
40
50
MB/sec Higher is Better

Small File Test - Write Speed

Arranged by Transfer Speed

  • Synology DS211+
  • Synology DS210+
  • Synology DiskStation DS211j
  • QNAP TS-219P Turbo NAS
  • QNAP TS-210 Turbo NAS
  • Synology USB Station 2
  • LG N2B1D
  • Icy Box IB-NAS3221
  • ZyXEL NSA-220 Plus
  • Xtreamer eTRAYz
  • 36.9
  • 27.0
  • 19.9
  • 17.6
  • 14.2
  • 12.0
  • 10.3
  • 6.4
  • 4.5
  • 1.0
0
10
20
30
40
MB/sec Higher is Better

Discuss this in the forums

Posted by wyx087 - Sat Aug 13 2011 10:49

wow, that's simply amazing speed.

and here is a public demo of their amazing NAS interface.
http://www.synology.com/us/products/demo/index.php

same as any electronic product, i always believe an easy to use one is miles better than a harder to use product that requires a lot of your time.

Posted by faugusztin - Sat Aug 13 2011 11:00

@wuyanxu: Other side of the coin is the situation like what happened to my coworker - he bought himself a QNAP NAS for 4 drives, because he could install ipkg packages. He was happy, until he found out that there is no PHP 5.3 package in ipkg, compiling it for yourself is hard as hell,...

NAS is good, if all you need is already supported by the firmware. But if you want more, you are maybe looking at wrong device for the job.

Posted by BrightCandle - Sat Aug 13 2011 11:17

I can't be the only person not impressed with the speed of these devices, they must be CPU limited as the drives and network are capable of much more.

A low end 2 core Sandy bridge CPU running at minimum speed running with an array of 4 Disks in Raid 5 will max out a gigabit connection, transferring files at 115-130 MB/s in both directions. Small file transfers around 60MB/s.

These NAS products aren't even that much cheaper than getting an MITX board with 2GB of RAM and a low end CPU with an appropriate case. They are simple to setup and use but so is FreeNas.

Posted by MSHunter - Sat Aug 13 2011 13:34

They should only sell NAS boxes with a minium of 4 drive bays and raid 5 support, otherwise why bother?
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  • Value
    21 / 30
  • Features
    33 / 35
  • Speed
    34 / 35

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