Smb 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.