Specifications

Where the DS215+ uses an Alpine AL-212 SoC with 1 GB of RAM, the DS715 comes with a much stronger quad-core Alpine AL-314 SoC and 2 GB of RAM, which, like in the DS215+, cannot be increased since the RAM modules are soldered to the mainboard. There is hardly any available information on Annapurna Labs SoCs, and we hope that Amazon, owner of the company, will release some information about these products soon. According to Synology, the AL-212 and AL-314 SoCs include a hardware-encoding engine; however, neither support the AES-NI instruction set, so we don't expect high transfer speeds with encrypted files, which is contrary to Synology's claims.

Without an expansion unit, the NAS can house up to 16 TB of data if 8 TB HDDs are used, and 56 TB of storage space with a JBOD configuration before the disks have been formatted is possible with Synology's expansion unit. The NAS also has two Ethernet ports that can be teamed for increased transfer speeds or higher reliability. The I/O ports include a couple USB 3.0 and a single eSATA port. There is unfortunately no USB port at the face of the NAS, which limits its usability a bit. The DS715 is pretty compact and pretty light without any HDDs installed.

A 92 mm fan featuring Sintetico bearings, which will have it last fairly long, keeps the unit cool. The warranty is set at two years, which is the norm for a NAS server, and it is priced at $470, which is around $70 more than the DS215+. $470 is a pretty stiff price for a two-bay NAS; however, this particular one's storage can be upgraded.