Introduction and design
The DS115j is an affordable NAS from Synology, aimed at home users and small office environments. It's a lot simpler than the larger, pricier units sold by the company, since it only supports a single 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch hard disk and comes with a relatively limited processor and memory.
But that simplicity is all part of its appeal. Like the larger units, it comes with Synology's superb DiskStation Manager software, which provides a straightforward and intuitive Windows-like graphical interface for using the NAS.
It takes about five minutes to screw in a hard disk, connect a network cable and start using it. You won't need to worry about RAID, or even understand what the term means. NAS devices aren't well known for being user friendly, but given the growing interest in them, especially among less technical users looking for an effective way to share files among multiple devices, the DS115j could be a good solution.
And importantly, with a quoted price of £78 (around $125, AU$145) – that's not including a hard disk, of course – it undercuts many of its rivals and other NAS units in Synology's range.
Design
The DS115j uses the same chassis design as other single-bay Synology units, such as the DS112j and DS114. The device is designed to stand upright, with rubber feet on the base. It opens easily by sliding off one half of the plastic case, which appears to be ever so slightly on the thin side.
Although the colour may not be everyone's first choice, I think the glossy white plastic exterior of the DS115j looks great, since these days, I'm more inclined towards that colour than any other for my gadgets. Blame decades of black electronics (the 1990s) and greys (the 1980s) for this particular OCD.
It's well built, looks snazzy and is really compact, with a footprint of 7.1cm by 16.6cm. It easily slots onto a shelf and won't take up a lot of space on your desk.
At the front, there's a single blue power indicator light, and three green lights for status, disk and network. At the back of the unit are two USB 2.0 ports and a Gigabit Ethernet connector. The USB ports are located very close to the power connector. You can plug in external USB storage, or a wireless or Bluetooth dongle into one of these ports, but only a slim, half-height one – my full-sized Belkin dongle simply wouldn't fit.
No USB 3.0
The file system is limited to 16TB, in case you were thinking of adding a monstrous additional 10TB via USB. Note that Synology hasn't included faster USB 3.0 ports, possibly to create an artificial difference between the DS115j and the more high-end units it sells.
Inside there's space for a 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch hard disk, with the SATA connectors easily accessible, and two bars running along it for mounting the disk, which are directly attached to the NAS. Each bar has a single hole for screws. With a 3.5-inch disk you fasten a screw into each bar, but you only need one with a 2.5-inch disk.
It's really important to fasten the screws. During early testing I didn't bother with them, but the weight of the 3.5-inch hard disk I was using caused it to move when I picked up the DS115j. It put pressure on the SATA connectors, and it's not hard to imagine them snapping, rendering the device completely useless.
Synology has very sensibly made the rear 6cm fan easily accessible, with an empty gap between it and the rest of the unit. If you've ever owned a NAS, you'll know how quickly they fill up with dust, especially if you leave them on the floor, so it's good that it can be easily removed and cleaned.
Specification
The DiskStation DS115j uses a Marvell Armada 370 system-on-chip, running at 800MHz, which places it at the lower end of Synology's NAS range. Marvell's technical documents show the processor is a single-core Arm v7 with 256KB of L2 cache. It can run up to 1.2GHz, but perhaps Synology doesn't feel this speed is necessary for a single-disk NAS like the DS115j. There's 256MB of DDR3 system memory as well.
It can accept hard disks up to 6TB in capacity. Synology quotes power usage of 12.6W in use, and 3.85W when idle, although that's when using a 2TB hard disk. I tested the DS115j with a WD Red 6TB disk, which raised the power consumption slightly to around 5.5W idle and 14.5W in use.
The DS115j comes with DiskStation Manager 5.0, Synology's custom software for managing its NAS products. The vast majority of networking devices, such as routers, IP cameras and many NAS devices, are managed using a web-based interface, relying on menus and submenus filled with various options to get around the system functions. Even the better ones stick to this UI paradigm.
DiskStation Manager is completely different though. While you still load it from a browser window, it presents a much more familiar WIMP (windows, icons, mouse, pointer) interface that closely resembles Linux, Windows or OS X.
The windows are resizable, and can be minimised or scrolled through, just as with a real desktop operating system. The UI even has some nice transparency effects. In short, it's impressive.
Four icons sit on the desktop – File Station, Control Panel, Packages, and DSM Help. It's fairly obvious what each does. At the top is a bar that works similarly to the Windows System tray. There's a notification system to tell you when, for example, there's been an unexpected shutdown or software update, and a widgets button which brings up a small system information window. At a glance, you can get information about disk, processor and memory usage, temperature details and which users are concurrently logged in.
Tools and performance
There are a lot of additional software tools with this NAS, in fact too many to go into detail about each one in this review – but a few catch the eye.
Firstly, it's easy to set up the DS115j for external access via the web, either via QuickConnect and Synology's MyDS service, or via another dynamic DNS system.
There's a security section in the control panel, with useful things such as DoS protection, a basic firewall, a way to automatically block IP addresses that fail to log in, and so on.
There's also a software package from Synology called Antivirus Essential, available from the Package Manager.
You can host a website on the DS115j, with Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla support, and of course there's DLNA and an iTunes media server. The DS115j can be configured as part of a domain or Windows Active Directory, and there are separate settings for Windows and Apple networking, as well as Samba and NFS. Of course there's an FTP server as well.
Other modules are available such as a VPN server, browser-based video and image viewers, surveillance management tools, voice communications, and more. I counted 59 modules in total available for the DS115j, although there are even more for the higher-end Synology units.
There's software to manage downloads via FTP, BitTorrent and so on, which lets you use the DS115j as an always-on torrent client, instead of leaving a PC turned on all the time.
Resource limitations
This is one aspect of the DS115j where the limited CPU and memory resources restrict what it can do. You're limited to 20 concurrent downloads, while the more high-end Synology NAS products, with Intel Xeon processors, go up to 80. There are other limits too. For example, if you use the DS115j with IP cameras, it only captures at 20fps at 1080p resolution.
As a further addition, there are eight mobile apps available for iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Support for the latter is good to see, given that Windows Phone is often last on the priorities list of mobile developers. The modular software system of Synology NAS products makes them more than merely network-accessible storage.
It appears not much has been disabled with the DS115j either, so for the price, you're getting a basic network server in addition to all the standard NAS-related things it can do. Not bad value at all.
Performance
I tested the DS115j with a basic file transfer, moving a 5GB folder filled with large movies, and one with smaller picture files, to and from the device. For more detailed analysis I also used Intel's NAS Performance Toolkit.
Gigabit Ethernet is limited to a theoretical maximum sequential transfer rate of 125MB/sec, less than the 152MB/sec I measured in my review of the WD Red 6TB. So it's clear that hard disk performance wouldn't limit the DS115j.
The WD Red 6TB was a good choice for testing as it's designed for use with NAS devices, with many small firmware tweaks that improve reliability when used in a NAS, although some of these tweaks assume it will be used as part of an array of multiple disks.
With the large file transfer I measured 46MB/sec while uploading to the device, and 51MB/sec downloading from it.
Smaller files create more overhead, and create more work for the processor in the DS115j, so performance is expected to be slower. But with 51MB/sec reading and 45MB/sec writing, the actual speeds were pretty much the same.
The Intel NAS Performance Toolkit is a suite of simulated file transfers that mimic different usage, such as playing HD video. It's a bit of a pain to use, since it (rightly) insists you limit system memory to 2GB in MSConfig to prevent caching interfering with NAS performance.
A highlight of this test was the 2xHD score, simulating two HD movies being played at once, where speeds hit 102MB/sec, beating a two-bay Zyxel NSA325 I had also tested under the same conditions. HD Playback Record was similarly better at 87MB/sec.
The only two areas where the DJ115j fell short were the Content Creation and Photo Editing tests, where it came in at just 8.9MB/sec and 8.5MB/sec.
But these speeds really aren't bad at all, given the low price and relatively low-end processor. They measure up well against some two-bay NAS devices and show that you shouldn't expect poor performance if you're on a limited budget.
Verdict
We liked
With the extendable software, the DS115j can be used as a basic network server, capable of a vast number of functions such as file downloads, DNS, web hosting and so on. Many other devices do this too, of course, but the intuitive DiskStation Manager software makes setting it up pretty straightforward.
Performance is good enough, and it's great value too. While USB or eSATA disk enclosures may cost slightly less, a vast majority of them are poorly built cheap designs. And they can't do half the things which the DS115j can manage.
We disliked
There are limits to what the DS115j can do, mostly due to its single-core processor and limited memory. I expect you'll notice its performance drop off with more than a few users, and while it offers some server functions, this is no replacement for a proper dedicated server.
There are a few issues with its build too. It's rather noisy at times, the plastic is slightly thin and you won't be able to fit any wireless dongle you choose into its USB ports, due to the positioning of the power connector. The USB ports are only USB 2.0 as well, which means only 802.11n dongles will attain their full transfer speed, rather than 802.11ac variants.
And while I see the lack of RAID as a blessing, due to the extra simplicity it brings, some people might want the redundancy of other modes you get with multi-disk NAS devices.
Final verdict
Given what you get for your money, I'd happily live with the few negative aspects of the DS115j. Granted, it's not the most powerful NAS money can buy, and while it offers a truckload of features, traditional network file sharing is still the bread and butter of NAS units – though fortunately it does well enough here, too.
As long as you don't mind white, the DS115j is a great looking, compact gadget. It's straightforward to set up and easy to use. The DiskStation Manager software is brilliant.
While it doesn't offer any specific feature that isn't provided by other NAS units, it presents its feature set in a far superior manner to nearly every other NAS going.
from TechRadar: Technology reviews http://ift.tt/1yetOKY
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