Synology DS1520+ 5-bay NAS

[crmaris]

The Synology DS1520+ is ideal for small offices or enthusiast users in need of more storage space. Should your storage requirements dramatically increase, it also provides huge expandability options. We also took a look at the new DSM 7.0 operating system and were seriously impressed.

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[Pepamami]

non-ecc memory in NAS for 700$ is kinda sad :C

 

[Chrispy_]

Needs 2.5G Ethernet really.
My cheapo DS220+ is already hampered by its gigabit ports but we're at the point where 2.5G is pretty common on motherboards and you can get cheap(ish) 2.5G switches for home use from about £125.

 

[redzo]

NAS without ECC should be illegal.

 

[TheLostSwede]

NAS without ECC should be illegal.

How so? If the memory controller in the CPU can't utilise ECC, then what's the point?

 

[Pepamami]

How so? If the memory controller in the CPU can't utilise ECC, then what's the point?

its NAS, and its 700$, just put a cpu that supports ECC, not some cheap stuff from RasberryPi board alike.
In 2021, Intel and Amd got some low power cpus with ECC support, u dont need Xeon for ecc.
I can buy HPE Microserver with pentium g5420 and ECC memory for less money

 

[TheLostSwede]

its NAS, and its 700$, just put a cpu that supports ECC, not some cheap stuff from RasberryPi board alike.
In 2021, Intel and Amd got some low power cpus with ECC support, u dont need Xeon for ecc.
I can buy HPE Microserver with pentium g5420 and ECC memory for less money

Please, go ahead, no-one is forcing you to buy this.

 

[Pepamami]

Please, go ahead, no-one is forcing you to buy this.

its not about wrong case color or shape.
missing ECC in >Nas< is people's major complaint. And ECC in Nas is a basic thing nowdays, read ZFS requirements for example, where they strongly recommend to use Ecc ram.
And I came here to complain about it too o/
Coz its not ok asking 700$ for incomplete product, coz they use wrong (not bad or expensive or cheap, just wrong) hardware in first place

 

[Tanquen]

"it also has two M.2 drives slots for NVMe drives, typically used as cache storage"

Will it let you do anything else with it? I got two SSDs for my DS-1821+ and was disappointed to find out that you can only use them as a read-only or read-write cache to a volume and once you do link it to a volume, if the SSDs lock up or fail then you lose the entire volume not just the cache. I'd much rather just set them up as their own volume and move VMs or other files that I wanted fast access to on them but for some reason they don't allow you to do that.

Also keep in mind that most drives above six or eight terabytes are now 7200 RPM and are total nightmare for a desktop NAS that's actually in your home office or living room. Even if you get the quietest ones with the best headseek decibel specs it's that low hum that'll be droning into your head 24/7 that I can't stand. I had to move mine to the downstairs utility room and run new fiber and power.

 

[TxGrin]

Needs 2.5G Ethernet really.
My cheapo DS220+ is already hampered by its gigabit ports but we're at the point where 2.5G is pretty common on motherboards and you can get cheap(ish) 2.5G switches for home use from about £125.

You can always add a USB3-5Gbps i did this to my DS718+ and get 400+ MB/s instead of using the gigabyte ports. I followed there instructions here using the qnap usb adapter (QNA-UC5G1T)

QNA-UC5G1T | Connect to 5GbE networks over USB 3.2 Gen 1 | QNAP

USB Ethernet adapter for 5Gbe on DS918+ | Synology Community

 

[TheLostSwede]

its not about wrong case color or shape.
missing ECC in >Nas< is people's major complaint. And ECC in Nas is a basic thing nowdays, read ZFS requirements for example, where they strongly recommend to use Ecc ram.
And I came here to complain about it too o/
Coz its not ok asking 700$ for incomplete product, coz they use wrong (not bad or expensive or cheap, just wrong) hardware in first place

That's your opinion. Again, no-one is forcing you to buy this.
Not everyone is using ZFS and it's really being oversold by certain groups on the internet.

 

[Chrispy_]

You can always add a USB3-5Gbps i did this to my DS718+ and get 400+ MB/s instead of using the gigabyte ports. I followed there instructions here using the qnap usb adapter (QNA-UC5G1T)

QNA-UC5G1T | Connect to 5GbE networks over USB 3.2 Gen 1 | QNAP

USB Ethernet adapter for 5Gbe on DS918+ | Synology Community

Oh, hadn't thought of that! My assumption was that USB3 ports were just for external hard drives but yeah - this is basically just a linux-based x86-64 machine; USB is USB

I only have a 2-bay NAS and I run RAID1 anyway so ~180MB/s is all I could get, best-case, on my Ironwolves. I'm okay with the ~115MB/s of gigabit ethernet given that I'm generally only streaming from or downloading to the NAS at much slower rates.

For $699 in 2021 I was kind of hoping for better than gigabit ethernet, that's all. Teaming NICs is a ghetto solution and doesn't work unless you also have two NICs in every machine. or your switch happens to aggregate for you automatically (I've not found one that does that yet).

To make matters worse, the competition (QNAP, TerraMaster) offer 10GbE options by default long before this price segment, so it's all just a bit disappointing - which is a shame because DSM 7.0 is nice and I'd like to use it on better hardware but Synology seem to have irritating product segmentation worse than Intel!

That's your opinion. Again, no-one is forcing you to buy this.
Not everyone is using ZFS and it's really being oversold by certain groups on the internet.

BTRFS is a reasonable alternative to ZFS and ECC that doesn't require ECC.
I'm not excusing the lack of ECC in this NAS because it would have required very little effort/cost from Synology to add - but it's not as big a deal as some people make it out to be.

 

[TheLostSwede]

BTRFS is a reasonable alternative to ZFS and ECC that doesn't require ECC.
I'm not excusing the lack of ECC in this NAS because it would have required very little effort/cost from Synology to add - but it's not as big a deal as some people make it out to be.

Well, Intel doesn't offer any CPUs in this price/product range, so I'm not sure how it can be solved with little effort/cost.
Synology also doesn't support ZFS, so yeah, ECC is as you point out, not a hard requirement.

To make matters worse, the competition (QNAP, TerraMaster) offer 10GbE options by default long before this price segment, so it's all just a bit disappointing - which is a shame because DSM 7.0 is nice and I'd like to use it on better hardware but Synology seem to have irritating product segmentation worse than Intel!

TerraMaster, yes, but I thought QNAP only offered SFP+ ports, even at this price range. In all fairness, QNAP has a lot more devices with 2.5Gbps than Synology.

Synology has always had the slicker software and QNAP the more attractive hardware...

 

[Pepamami]

That's your opinion. Again, no-one is forcing you to buy this.
Not everyone is using ZFS and it's really being oversold by certain groups on the internet.

You dont need ECC only for ZFS, expensive Nas product just must have it and I am telling here my opinion about it, nothing wrong with that.
Even SSD has ecc ram.

Synology just abuse these "certain groups" by selling them simple hardware for higher price tags. Coz these "certain groups" dont have time or knowledge to build their own nas, and they have to rely on complete market products.

I would be very upset, if my granma gonna spend money on that piece of hardware, that cant even provide basic 2021 things: ECC and 2.5gbe for 700$ price tag.

And yes. nobody cares, who wants a good Nas gonna make it themselfs or buy some Enterprise product from HPE/Dell/Lenovo etc (we got plenty of "Nas-Ready" OS on market)
If people would care, we would get some progress in hardware or price tags in non-enterprise Nas market. But all I hear is "no-one is forcing you to buy this" or "Will it let you do anything else with it".

 

[TheLostSwede]

You dont need ECC only for ZFS, expensive Nas product just must have it and I am telling here my opinion about it, nothing wrong with that.
Even SSD has ecc ram.

Synology just abuse these "certain groups" by selling them simple hardware for higher price tags. Coz these "certain groups" dont have time or knowledge to build their own nas, and they have to rely on complete market products.

I would be very upset, if my granma gonna spend money on that piece of hardware, that cant even provide basic 2021 things: ECC and 2.5gbe for 700$ price tag.

And yes. nobody cares, who wants a good Nas gonna make it themselfs or buy some Enterprise product from HPE/Dell/Lenovo etc (we got plenty of "Nas-Ready" OS on market)
If people would care, we would get some progress in hardware or price tags in non-enterprise Nas market. But all I hear is "no-one is forcing you to buy this" or "Will it let you do anything else with it".

This is NOT an expensive NAS in the grand scheme of things and no-one that needs that kind of bit perfect data redundancy would never even look at a product like this.

No-one is abusing anything, this product has a $20 CPU in it, what do you expect the end product will be?
You're paying for support, you're paying for them to develop their custom OS and so on.
A DIY NAS comes with none of that.

Again, ECC is NOT a basic thing. Most CPUs from Intel DO NOT support ECC. How hard is this to understand?
2.5Gbps Ethernet is not basic either, but yes, it could be expected on a product in this price class.

As long as there is no support from the CPU maker, how are you expecting anything to change? This doesn't have anything to do with the consumers or the device makers. Besides, if this had ECC support, it would cost another $200 retail because of it, as the companies that sell these things would charge more for it. But I guess you'd be happy to pay that just so you get ECC support?

I actually used to work for QNAP and these companies can't go to Intel and say, hey, we'd like this and this feature in your next CPU. Intel will tell them to get lost.
These companies have a few hundred employees at the most and they use what's available in the market. They don't have the power of HP, Dell or Lenovo. They also don't get the same preferential pricing or any of the other perks the big guys get.

And why do your granny need a five drive NAS?
Oh and can you ask her to teach you how to spell, as my brain hurts after reading you post.

 

[Chrispy_]

Well, Intel doesn't offer any CPUs in this price/product range, so I'm not sure how it can be solved with little effort/cost.
Synology also doesn't support ZFS, so yeah, ECC is as you point out, not a hard requirement.


TerraMaster, yes, but I thought QNAP only offered SFP+ ports, even at this price range. In all fairness, QNAP has a lot more devices with 2.5Gbps than Synology.

Synology has always had the slicker software and QNAP the more attractive hardware...

I was thinking one of the Apollo Lake Atoms - they all support ECC and are of similar family/generation to the Celeron J Synology chose to use instead.

Edit:
Atom X5 E3940 is pretty much the same lineage and product spec as the Celeron J4125 used by synology. It's Goldmont rather than Goldmont+ but since Intel haven't gotten around to refreshing it with Tremont on 10nm yet, it remains in production as the current offering.

 

[Pepamami]

Oh and can you ask her to teach you how to spell, as my brain hurts after reading you post.

Now u feel my pain, when I see a 700$ tag on this piece of hardware.

Like I said from the beginning:
This is Sad

upd: I am more a reader/listener, I dont possess any good writing/talking experience right now :C sorry

 

[TheLostSwede]

I was thinking one of the Apollo Lake Atoms - they all support ECC and are of similar family/generation to the Celeron J Synology chose to use instead.

Which ones?

Products formerly Apollo Lake

Products formerly Apollo Lake product listing with links to detailed product features and specifications.

ark.intel.com

You talking about the X series from 2016? As they're the only ones that support ECC.
Not really seen those in a lot of products.

Synology seems to prefer the C3000-series of Atom CPUs, but they can't do video transcoding, as they don't have a GPU.

 

[Chrispy_]

Which ones?

Products formerly Apollo Lake

Products formerly Apollo Lake product listing with links to detailed product features and specifications.

ark.intel.com

You talking about the X series from 2016? As they're the only ones that support ECC.
Not really seen those in a lot of products.

Synology seems to prefer the C3000-series of Atom CPUs, but they can't do video transcoding, as they don't have a GPU.

Edited my original post above. The Atom X5 E3490 is basically the same as the Celeron J3455 but with ECC - and that's what Synology would have used instead if Intel hadn't refreshed it into the J4125.

I know they're old but they're not discontinued - likely to be holding down that product line until replaced by a Tremont/10nm soon. The Tremont-based Celerons have just started rolling off the line so it won't be too long.

 

[GabrielLP14]

Awesome review @crmaris i'd just recommend correct the type of Memory used in page (look inside) which says "DDR2 2666MHz" which is in fact a regular DDR4