Synology DS415+ Review: DSM on Intel Rangeley
by Ganesh T S on October 30, 2014 7:30 AM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- Storage
- Intel
- Synology
- Silvermont
- Enterprise
- Rangeley
Encryption Support Evaluation
Consumers looking for encryption capabilities can opt to encrypt a iSCSI share with TrueCrypt or some in-built encryption mechanism in the client OS. However, if requirements dictate that the data must be shared across multiple users / computers, relying on encryption in the NAS is the best way to move forward. Most NAS vendors use the industry-standard 256-bit AES encryption algorithm. One approach is to encrypt only a particular shared folder while the other approach is to encrypt the full volume. Synology supports only folder-level encryption for now in DSM.
On the hardware side, encryption support can be in the form of specialized hardware blocks in the SoC (common in ARM / PowerPC based NAS units). In x86-based systems, accelerated encryption support is dependent on whether the AES-NI instruction is available on the host CPU. One of the most attractive features of the Intel Rangeley platform / Silvermont cores is full hardware acceleration for all essential cryptography functions. The results, as you can see below, are consistent across all evaluated scenarios. The penalty compared to unencrypted shares is non-existent.
The write performance with encrypted shares could do with some improvement (for certain workload traces). Other than that, the higher clock for the SoC (compared to the Seagate NAS Pro) and the presence of AES-NI in the SoC (compared to its absence in the SoC used in the QNAP TS-451) enable the DS415+ to come out trumps in most of the above benchmarks.
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Arkive - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
Does this (or any NAS that you know of) support simultaneous access from both the USB port as well as over the network? I understand the "only one interface can control the storage at one time" issue, but I'm really hoping someone is working to overcome this, even if it means that one of those interfaces is locked into read-only mode.ganeshts - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
The USB ports are host ports, i.e, storage devices or WLAN USB sticks can be connected to it. The USB port can't be used to connect to a PC for using the unit as a DAS (direct-attached storage).rpg1966 - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
Seriously, articles with graphs showing two aspects of the same thing (e.g. rebuild times in this case) need to be shown on an X-Y chart, so that the trade-offs are immediately and obviously visible.The same goes for many similar pairs of charts you show in other reviews, e.g. power-vs-noise in GPU or case reviews.
echtogammut - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
I almost spat coffee all over my monitor when I saw the tertiary drive in the test rig. That is a very expensive way of eliminating the test rig as a performance bottleneck in the tests.Salipander - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
It's about time that transcoding includes h265 support, and be mentioned in reviews. This DS415+ unit may provide this for resolutions up to 1080p. This is for sure not supported by the DS415play, as it won't have the cpu power to do this in sw, but the DS415+ just may do it.I have quite a movie collection and I am halving the needed storage by transcoding the files from h264 to h265, including all the sub 4k files (which is 100% of them ;-) I may be an early h265 adopter, but the cpu intensive transcoding is worth the effort already. The x265 coder is of such a good quality now (since august at least), that I dare to go for it.
It would be nice to have the DS Video capability to transcode h265 to something suited for current tablets and media players!
DanNeely - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
Is the ram soldered to the PCB, or in a dimm that could be swapped out for an ECC module?skarnm2 - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
I did read elsewhere it was soldered. It is on the larger models it's swap-able.chubbypanda - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
Non-ECC and ECC modules aren't interchangeable. Do not attempt!mpbrede - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
Define COTS, please? Some form of "... Off The Shelf"ganeshts - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link
Commercial :)I thought it was pretty common usage, and a cursory search online makes me think I may not have been mistaken: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COTS