Nas articles

The DS2413+ is Synology's newest twelve-bay DiskStation NAS for small to medium sized businesses who need loads of storage. Along with supporting up to 48TB worth of drives out of the box, the DS2413+ can be paired with the company's DX1211 expansion enclosure that houses an extra 12 drives, doubling the maximum storage capacity of the base unit to a whopping 96TB.

We should also make a quick note before you get to the end and scoff at the price: the DS2413+ isn't for average home users. It's retailing for $1,700 without drives or the 12-bay expansion. With that in mind, let's see what the DS2413+'s upgrades offer.

Hoping to drive small and medium business sales, NAS-makers have been pushing to deliver enterprise features such as cloud storage, virtualization support, automated backup software and iSCSI support. There's also been an effort to include technologies such as Link Aggregation, which can increase network bandwidth when dealing with multiple users and also provides redundancy in case one of the links fails.

First seen over a decade ago, 10GbE is ten times faster than Gigabit Ethernet, but it's been largely reserved for pricey devices. With that in mind, we're checking out two new high-end SMB NAS devices: the QNAP TS-879 Pro and the Synology DS3612xs.

The Synology DS1512+ boasts faster read and write speeds compared to its predecessor and packs an updated dual core 2.13GHz Intel Atom D2700 (32nm Cedar Trail) CPU, which should provide a little more oomph than the dated Atom D525.

These extras come at a reasonable $100 premium over last year's DS1511+, which should position this 5-bay device as a respectable contender in the current NAS market. Let's take a closer look at the hardware and DiskStation Manger 4.0 software before we greet Synology's latest offering with our usual array of benchmarks.

The Synology DiskStation DS2411+ is a business-class NAS device suitable for SMB users, however its $1,700 asking price makes it a little more feasible when compared to other enterprise and rackmount NAS devices with similar capacities but much steeper price tags.

This may well beyond the grasp of the average user, but we're confident those who require such radical storage solutions will find a lot to appreciate in the DS2411+.

As one of QNAP's most affordable 4-bay NAS, we were unsurprisingly drawn to the TS-412. The device is fetching only $40 more than the older TS-410, but considering its Marvell processor runs 50% faster, we feel the TS-412 is a better value.

The QNAP TS-412 could displace Synology's $360 DS411J, but we're also curious about how it compares to NAS devices in the $500-$600 bracket. Assuming QNAP's latest product doesn't disappoint – and they rarely do – the TS-412 has a fair chance at becoming the "go-to" 4-bay NAS.

Just over four years ago, we reviewed our first Thecus product: a dual-bay NAS powered by an Intel IOP 80219 processor and 128MB of DDR RAM. Although we appreciated many aspects of the Y.E.S. Box, it wasn't without flaws. It's incredible how far we've come in terms of cost and functionality in just a few years.

The new N3200XXX is part of Thecus' XXX series, which supposedly delivers Xtreme power, Xtreme function, and Xtreme value. As cute as that may be, we're more interested in seeing how it stacks up to the competition.