Every year we come across devices that offer numerous features on top of the traditional file sharing. A lot NAS (Network Attached Storage) manufacturers push more and more in to their devices as far as applications and features go and let’s face it, all of these features come with the price. You do get what you pay for but what if you are looking for a budget friendly storage device that offers redundancy and a number of important features that could be helpful to just about everyone? The Synology DS416j just may be the NAS that fits that bill. DS416j is a budget friendly NAS device that has a lot of offer. Review Sample Provided by: Synology Product Name: DS416j Price at time of review: $ 289.99 USD MSRP Product was given in exchange for work done to produce this review. Packaging DS416j is oriented towards home or small office setting. So with that in mind there is nothing special about packaging of this device. Packaging of DS416j is plain cardboard with couple of images of the actual unit inside. On the back of the box is a graphic that illustrates all of the physical features of this unit. To keep everything in the place, Synology packaged DS416j in a foam wrap with cardboard inserts to secure the NAS in the box. The foam wrap is specifically used here to keep DS416j from any accidental damage such as scratches and dings. Synology DS416j comes with a power brick, power cord, a bag of screws, Cat 5e network cable and a Welcome/Quick Installation Guide. DS416j has everything to get you up and running in minutes, the only thing you need is to bring your own drives. Specifications Hardware Specifications Hardware Specifications CPU CPU Model Marvell Armada 388 88F6828 CPU Architecture 32-bit CPU Frequency Dual Core 1.3 GHz Floating Point Yes Hardware Encryption Engine Yes Memory System Memory 512 MB DDR3 Storage Drive Bay(s) 4 Compatible Drive Type (See all supported drives) 3.5" SATA III / SATA II HDD 2.5" SATA III / SATA II HDD 2.5" SATA III / SATA II SSD Maximum Internal Raw Capacity 32 TB (8 TB HDD x 4) (Capacity may vary by RAID types) Maximum Single Volume Size 16 TB External Ports USB 2.0 Port 1 USB 3.0 Port 1 File System Internal Drives EXT4 External Drives EXT4 EXT3 FAT NTFS HFS+ (Read Only, with max. volume size 2TB) Appearance Size (Height x Width x Depth) 184 mm x 168 mm x 230 mm Weight 2.21 kg Others RJ-45 1GbE LAN Port 1 Wake on LAN/WAN Yes System Fan 80 mm x 80 mm x 2 pcs Fan Speed Mode Cool Mode Quiet Mode Low-power Mode Wireless Support (dongle) Yes Brightness adjustable front LED indicators Yes Power Recovery Yes Noise Level* 19.1 dB(A) Scheduled Power On/Off Yes Power Supply Unit / Adapter 90W AC Input Power Voltage 100V to 240V AC Power Frequency 50/60 Hz, Single Phase Power Consumption* 21.6 W (Access) 12.75 W (HDD Hibernation) British Thermal Unit 73.75 BTU/hr (Access) 43.53 BTU/hr (System Hibernation) Environment Temperature Operating Temperature 5°C to 40°C (40°F to 104°F) Storage Temperature -20°C to 60°C (-5°F to 140°F) Relative Humidity 5% to 95% RH Certification FCC Class B CE Class B BSMI Class B Warranty 2 Years Notes Power consumption is measured when fully loaded with Western Digital 1TB WD10EFRX hard drive(s). Support for Wake on WAN needs switch and routers which recognize Magic Packet. Noise Level Testing Environment: Fully loaded with Seagate 1TB ST31000520AS hard drive(s) in idle; Two G.R.A.S. Type 40AE microphones, each set up at 1 meter away from the Synology NAS front and rear; Background noise: 16.49-17.51 dB(A); Temperature: 24.25-25.75˚C; Humidity: 58.2-61.8% DSM Specifications ( See more ) Storage Management Maximum Internal Volume Number 256 Maximum iSCSI Target Number 10 Maximum iSCSI LUN 10 Supported RAID Type Synology Hybrid RAID Basic JBOD RAID 0 RAID 1 RAID 5 RAID 6 RAID 10 RAID Migration Basic to RAID 1 Basic to RAID 5 RAID 1 to RAID 5 RAID 5 to RAID 6 Volume Expansion with Larger HDDs Synology Hybrid RAID RAID 1 RAID 5 RAID 6 Volume Expansion by Adding a HDD Synology Hybrid RAID RAID 5 JBOD Global Hot Spare Supported RAID Type Synology Hybrid RAID RAID 1 RAID 5 File Sharing Capacity Maximum User Accounts 1024 Maximum Groups 256 Maximum Shared Folder 256 Maximum Shared Folder Sync Tasks 2 Maximum Concurrent CIFS/AFP/FTP Connections 128 Windows Access Control List (ACL) Integration Yes NFS Kerberos Authentication Yes Log Center Yes Syslog Events per Second 100 Add-on Packages (See more) Antivirus Essential Yes Audio Station Yes Cloud Station Yes Maximum Concurrent File Transfers 128 Cloud Sync Yes Directory Server Yes DNS Server Yes Download Station Yes Maximum Concurrent Download Tasks 30 Glacier Backup Yes HiDrive Backup Yes iTunes Server Yes Java Manager Yes Mail Server Yes Mail Station Yes Media Server Yes DLNA Certification Yes Note Station Yes Photo Station Yes RADIUS Server Yes Surveillance Station Yes Maximum IP cam (Licenses required) 16 (including 2 Free License) (See All Supported IP Cameras) Total FPS (H.264)* 480 FPS @ 720p (1280x720) 240 FPS @ 1080p (1920×1080) 150 FPS @ 3M (2048x1536) 60 FPS @ 5M (2591x1944) Total FPS (MJPEG)* 240 FPS @ 720p (1280x720) 100 FPS @ 1080p (1920×1080) 60 FPS @ 3M (2048x1536) 30 FPS @ 5M (2591x1944) Video Station Yes Video Transcoding Group 2 (See more) VPN Server Yes Maximum Connections 5 Notes Surveillance Station throughput is tested with Axis network camera, using continuous recording with live view from Surveillance Station and motion detection by camera. Live view and recording are sharing the same stream from the camera. Environment & Packaging Environment RoHS Compliant Packaging Content Main Unit X 1 Welcome Note X 1 Accessory Pack X 1 AC Power Adapter X 1 AC Power Cord X 1 RJ-45 LAN Cable X 1 Optional Accessories Camera License Pack VS360HD Closer Look at the Synology DS416j DS416j weights about 4.8kg/2.21lb without drives. Because of the external power distributor DS416j has a very weight. Dimensions of DS416j are184 (H) x 168(D) x 230(W) mm / 7.2(H) x 6.6(D) x 9(W) inch. There aren't any buttons besides power button which is located in the front of the unit. However there is Status, Network, and hard drive status LEDs. On the back of the unit there is a couple of USB ports (One USB 2.0 and one USB 3.0). DS416j has only one Ethernet connection which is also located on the back. The whole unit is powered by proprietary power connector that connects to power block. DS416j can utilize up to four drives. To install hard drives you will need to unscrew rear screws and remove the top cover of the NAS. The hard drive sleds are in the middle of the unit and are being cooled by two 80mm fans. Synology DS416j CPU is by Marvell Armada 388. This CPU is clocked at 1.3GHz (Dual Core). It is worth to mention that this CPU is passively cooled by the heat sink. Air delivery system is powered by two 80 mm fans which pull air from the front of the enclosure. There are no RAM sockets on the motherboard. Marvell 88e1514-nnp2 is the Gigabit Ethernet controller on this model. This controller supports more than one Ethernet connection but we only have one in this model. To achieve lower latencies and see less of interference from the devices, DS416j has a 1000 base-t magnetic module. (Bothhand USA 24hss1041a-2). All of the server configurations are being kept by Altera 5m80z module - device selector/max v. On board RAM is being provided by Samsung k4b2g1646q- 512MB DDR3L and is soldiered to the motherboard. Please note that this is DDR3L which is a low voltage ram which is designed to work perfectly with low voltage motherboards/devices. Hard drive back plane is based on SATA connections. If you look closely, Synology is actually using SAS connectors here. I wonder if this model will ever support SAS drives (currently supporting SATSA III and II drives). Front panel daughter board only have one button for power and five small status LEDs. Hard drive sleds are made from plastic. Installation of the hard drives requires users to screw the drives to the sleds. Synology DiskStation DS416j Start-up Wizard After installing the drives, you’ll need open a browser window and go to the IP Address of the DS416j. The first task the wizard will step though is updating your firmware. As long as the NAS has access to the Internet, it will go to Synology’s website and download the latest and greatest firmware. If the NAS cannot connect to the Internet, a manual install option is available. The DiskStation DS416j will show an installation progress meter while installing the firmware. After installation is complete, the NAS will reboot. After the device reboot, you will be taken to the next step of the process which, is to set the NAS’s name on the network and set up an administrative user name and password. The next page will ask how you would like the updates to install from Synology and when to schedule them. To get up to speed you are offered to install some of the useful applications with just a click of a button. The next step in the setup process is to create a QuickConnect ID. QuickConnect is Synology’s solution allowing users to access the data on the NAS anywhere they can get Internet access without having to worry about configuring networking equipment. The final pages is the configuration confirmation page. After you click the next button, you’ll be taken to the DSM desktop. DiskStation Manager (DSM) User Interface DiskStation Manager or DSM is the interface you will use to configure the NAS with; the latest released version is 5.2 with 6.0 beta 2 available for download. There are a lot of configuration options in DSM. I am covering what I feel is the most important options in order to get the NAS up and running on the network. After the initial configuration, anytime that you’ll want to log into the NAS, you’ll need to enter the username and password that was set up in the Startup Wizard. After logging in, you’ll be taken to the desktop. The desktop functions in a similar manner to the Windows desktop on your PC. You can create shortcuts to the most used configuration items in the menu. By default, a small monitoring application launches in the lower right side of the page. The application displays quick details on the utilization and health of the NAS. The main application on the menu that will be used to configure the NAS will be the control panel. The control panel has most of the options that will be needed to get the NAS up and running. By default a lot of the services needed, such as file services have already been turned on. After the disk volume has been created (next section) you’ll just need to create shared folders and assign permissions and the users can start using the NAS. Users and groups can be created to give access to the NAS’s shared files and folders. If no users are created, you will need to give the guest or public account read/write access to the shared files. If you run a Windows Active Directory domain, you can configured the NAS to synchronize user information from your domain. At that point, you will also be able to grant domain users access to shared folders and eliminates the need to create separate users for your domain and your NAS. The network menu is where all the networking configuration is done. Synology DS416j has one network interface, it cannot be configured for load balancing or fail over. However, it is worth mentioning that other models with multiple network interfaces can take advantage of creating a Link Aggregation Group (LAG) and LACP in order to do load balancing (managed switch required). Keep in mind that creating a LAG will not increase bandwidth from a single host. It increases the overall bandwidth the NAS can use on your network to multiple hosts. If you don’t have the ability to cable your NAS for example in a dorm room, you can install a USB wireless or blue-tooth adapter and get network access that way. The security tab allows you to configure such items as user interface timeouts, firewall, and certifications. The firewall tab can be used to restrict network traffic to and from the NAS in order to help protect it from network attacks and can help reduce the chance of a network breach. The NAS also offers denial-of-service protection and the ability to install your own certificate to further secure the NAS. Testing Methodology System Configuration Case Cooler Master Cosmos II CPU AMD FX-8370E Motherboard ASRock 990FX Killer Ram 2 GB G.Skill F3-12800CL9q DDR3-1600 GPU Gigabyte Radeon R9 290 Hard Drives Samsung 850 EVO 256gb SSD Network Cards Dual Port Intel Pro/1000 PT Switches ALLIED TELESYN AT-9924T ADVANCED LAYER 3+ GIGABIT 24-PORT NETWORK SWITCH, Boot (2.6.6-02) Cat6E cables used for network testing. Power Supply Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1200W 4 Seagate 4 TB 7200 RPM desktop drives were installed and used in the NAS tests. A dual port Intel network card was installed in the test system. The Synology DS416j in all RAID arrays used a Single Static Volume. Network Layout For all tests the NAS was configured to use the a single network interface. One CAT 6 cable was connected to the Allied Telesis AT-9924T from the NAS and one CAT 6 cable was connected to the workstation from the switch. Testing was done on the PC with only 1 network card active; the Killer network card and the corresponding software were disabled for the testing. The switch was cleared of any configuration and left in a un-configured state. Jumbo frames was not enabled and no changes to the network interfaces was made. Software All testing is done based off of a single client accessing the NAS. To test NAS Performance I used The Intel NAS Performance toolkit. The Intel NAS Performance toolkit simulates various tasks for storage devices such as video streaming, copying files and folders to and from the NAS as well as creating content directly on the NAS. To limit caching, a 2GB G.Skill memory module was used in all tests. All options in the Performance toolkit were left that the defaults. The NAS performance test is free to download. You can pick up a copy for yourself here. All tests were run a total of three times then averaged to get the final result. RAID 0,5,10 and RAID Hybrid were tested. Tests were run after all the RAID arrays were fully synchronized RAID Information Images courtesy of Wikipedia Images courtesy of Wikipedia JOBD or Just a Bunch Of Disks is exactly what the name describes. The hard drives have no actual raid functionality and are spanned at random data is written at random. RAID 0 is a stripe set and data is written across the disks evenly. The advantage of RAID 0 is speed and increased capacity. With RAID 0 there is no redundancy and data loss is very possible. RAID 1 is a mirrored set and data is mirrored from one drive to another. The advantage of RAID 1 is data redundancy as each piece of data is written to both disks. The disadvantage of RAID 1 is write speed is decreased as compared to RAID 0 due to the write operation is performed on both disks. RAID 1 capacity is that of the smallest disk. RAID 10 combines the 1st two raid levels and is a mirror of a stripe set. This allows for better speed of a RAID 0 array but the data integrity of a RAID 1 array. RAID 5 is a stripe set with parity. RAID 5 requires at least 3 disks. Data is striped across each disk, and each disk has a parity block. RAID 5 allows the loss of one drive without losing data. The advantage to RAID 5 is read speeds increase as the number of drives increase but the disadvantage is write speeds are slower as the number of drives is increased. There is overhead with RAID 5 as the parity bit needs to be calculated and with software RAID 5 there is more of a performance hit. RAID 6 expands on RAID 5 by adding an additional parity block to the array that is distributed across all the disks. Since there are two parity blocks in the array more overhead is used with a RAID 6 array. For a full breakdown of RAID levels, take a look at the Wikipedia article here. RAID configurations are a highly debated topic. RAID has been around for a very long time. Hard drives have changed, but the technology behind RAID really hasn’t. So what may have been considered ideal a few years ago may not be ideal today. If you are solely relying on multiple hard drives as a safety measure to prevent data loss, you are in for a disaster. Ideally you will use a mutli-drive array for an increase in speed and lower access times and have a backup of your data elsewhere. I have seen arrays with hot spares that had multiple drives fail and the data was gone. Intel NAS Performance Toolkit Results Following is the results of the Intel NAS Performance Toolkit benchmark for DS416j. As you can see DS416j device is very close in performance to other multibay NAS devices. Synology Hybrid RAID Synology has a RAID array they call Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR). Essentially it is for those users that do not know a whole lot about RAID or those users that don’t want to fuss with setting up a RAID array. There are two options available for SHR, 1-disk (similar to RAID 5) or 2-disk redundancy (similar to RAID 6). The redundant disk basically mean you can lose n number of drives (n is the number of redundant disks) and the array will continue to work and data will still be available with no corruption. SHR also allows the use of mixed size drives meaning, that all the drives in your NAS do not have to be the same capacity. You can do the same with a traditional RAID array however, all the drives in the array can only use the amount of space available on the smallest drive. For example, in a 5 drive array the smallest disk is 250 GB. You would create a 5×250 GB raid array. With SHR, the system divides the disks into smaller chunks and creates additional redundant storage. There’s a catch however, you must have two of the largest drives installed. Taking the example above, with 5×250 GB drives, you could swap out 2 of the drives to 1 TB drives and be able to use all of the disk space available. Image provided by Synology Besides ease of setup, SHR also allows you to expand to larger disks on the fly, one disk at a time. I was easily able to expand a 4 drive SHR array into a 5 drive array. However, it did take about 12 hours to add a 4TB drive to the array. Image provided by Synology SHR does suffer from a performance hit compared to traditional RAID. In the result below, I took a 4 disk SHR 1-disk redundant array and compared it against a 4 disk RAID 5 array. Conclusion and Final Thoughts In the modern data-centric society, high capacity storage devices are always in demand. Back in 1985 40MB hard drive was in high demand and the going price for it was around $20,000 USD. Now you can pick up a 4Tb hard drive for about $200 USD. With our growth in technology we need massive and affordable storage devices. Synology has been in NAS business since their beginning in 2000. Their first NAS, DS-101, was released in 2004 and since then we have seen a numerous growth of NAS devices in Synology’s line up. Synology offers numerous NAS products starting from home use all the way enterprise use. DS416j fall under home use / on the budget model storage device. If you are looking for just storing your file and worrying a little less about running out of space, then DS416j might be a good fit. This little NAS has a great number of features that complement its storage capabilities. What I found helpful is the graphical user interface of DS416j and how easy it was to set up and get up and running in just a matter of minutes. DS416j offers RAID redundancy which I strongly encourage to take advantage of. Depending of which RAID configuration you pick, you may have a failure of one of the hard drives and still retain all of your data without loss. It is worth to mention that relying on RAID alone is not ideal for data storage backup. The rule of thumb is to have your data in three different places. A good example would be having a data on laptop, NAS device and a cloud service. You already have your data , DS416j provides you a network attached storage and all you really need is a cloud service to push your data to from DS416j. DiskStation Manager (GUI that is used to manage DS416j) offers a seamless connector (Cloud Sync) to sync your files to your favorite cloud offerings. (Dropbox, Google Drive, Box etc). Right now DS416j retails for about 290$. I strongly believe that there is a very well balanced price between hardware and the amount of features you are getting with this particular unit. Do keep in mind that if you are planning to use DS416j you need to purchase drives separately from the device itself. Depending on the hard drive capacity you may easily reach 32TB with this small unit. If you are looking for inexpensive storage device for your home or even a small office, do consider DS416j. I am overly satisfied with performance and offerings of this product.
