Introduction

We would like to thank Synology for supplying the review sample.



Synology also offers several rackmount NAS boxes that are clearly for business environments since most home users don't use or even have racks. Synology's entry rackmount NAS offering is the 1U RS816 capable of taking up to four HDDs, or twice that in combination with a compatible expansion unit.

In order to reduce production cost and energy consumption, the RS816 uses a Marvell SoC featuring a dual-core CPU. Supported by 1 GB of RAM, these specs are far from impressive, but given the frugal hardware requirements of Synology's OS (DiskStation Manager), we believe the RS816 will perform well. Synology says this NAS to be capable of up to 220 MB/s read and 145 MB/s write speeds if you exploit both its Gigabit Ethernet ports through the link aggregation protocol.

A business-oriented NAS will frequently be asked to handle encrypted and normal file transfers, and Synology says the RS816 to fare pretty well with such tasks because of the hardware encryption engine its SoC provides. The read and write speeds Synology claims this NAS to be capable of with encrypted files look satisfactory, but we will verify them using our custom-made test suite, which will push the server's hardware to its limits.