Synology DS1621+ NAS Hardware Review

Synology DS1621+ NAS Review

Making the shift from a cloud service to your own private server can seem fantastically intimidating on the outset. However in recent years we have seen numerous user-friendly, yet cost-effective solutions arrive on the scene for most small-medium business users and few companies have done more to facilitate this migration than Synology with their range of NAS solutions. After more than 20 years in the industry, they have produced hundreds of solutions that vary in their price, support, hardware, power and functionality to fit it the end-user. The latest addition to this family is the newly released DS1621+ NAS drive, a shared drive solution intended for business users looking for robust, reliable, setup and forget storage solutions. Arriving with noticeable upgrades over it’s predecessor, the DS1618+, this system forms part of the newly revealed Synology 2020/2021 range of hardware. This combined hardware and software solution is fighting to be your next big tech business purchase, but does it deserve your money and your data? Let’s find out.

Synology DS1621+ NAS Review – Quick Conclusion

The Synology ‘Plus’ series of devices has long held a reputation for providing mid-range hardware to mid-range business customers. Because of this, the DS1621+ needs to balance a fine line between providing fast and reliable hardware, whilst still maintaining a price point that won’t intimidate the average small-medium business user. In this regard, I think the Synology DS1621+ NAS gets it right, finding an impressive halfway point between these two factors. However, it is important for buyers to understand what they are buying and where the price point for the Synology DS1621+ is being aimed. Although it seemingly lacks some of the multimedia and prosumer features of ‘cheaper’ NAS devices in the Synology portfolio, it doubles down on more business and enterprise-level features in efforts to support that core audience. It’s about getting the right tool for the job and in that area, Synology almost completely succeed. The lack of above gigabit connectivity afforded to a NAS unit at this price point, compared with their competitors, may put some users off, but on the whole, you are getting good performance and excellent value on this combined hardware and software solution with some excellent scalability.

Yes, I am about to talk about cardboard boxes, but the complete package of the DS1621+ serves as part of why Synology is seemingly the ‘Apple’ of NAS. Arriving in the oh so familiar packaging that most Synology NAS systems come with, the DS1621+ NAS it is pretty well protected and pleasantly presented. As this is a 6-bay solution, it moves away from the home user market towards the business bracket quite swiftly and the retail packaging indicates as much.

As highlighted in other Synology NAS reviews in the past here, I always like the understated natures of the packaging, seemingly bland and looks ‘the same box with a sticker as the others’, but a closer look shows that it is indeed distinct to the rest of the Synology products. A very small detail, but appreciated.

Covered in that usual Synology smooth branding design, the DS1621+ also arrives with a good level of physical protection from shock damage in transit. The NAS arrives with an impressively thick amount of rigid foam surrounding the system. Movement in transit is easily one of the largest factors in damage to computer-related goods, so it’s good that Synology has spent the extra few quid here on this largely exclusive online purchase.

Inside the retail box, we find the usual Synology accessories and contents:

• DS1621+ NAS System
• Power cord (Mains) for the internal PSU
• RJ-45 network cable x2 (CAT 5e)
• Quick Installation Guide x1

You have here, pretty much everything that you’re going to need to set up your Synology DS1621+ NAS on day one, with the exception of storage media. Synology has always provided their solutions unpopulated and with the exception of recent releases in SSD Media (the SNV3400 and SAT5200 ranges), they still maintain this position with hard drive Media inside their NAS solutions. I have heard rumblings to the contrary on this in the last week or so, but that’s a story for another day.

To be honest, there isn’t really anything particularly outstanding about the accessories that the unit arrives with. That in itself is not the end of the world, as what you do get is all very competent. Information relating to first time setup of the DS1621+ is largely limited to a paper diagram based first-time setup manual that directs the reader to links, recommending using online resources from the brand to set up the device to your tailored network needs.

The network cables that the Synology DS1621+ arrives with are cat5e in design, which is perfectly fine for this 1Gbe enabled NAS, though those that will upgrade there ethernet via PCIe cards may wish to upgrade these too. All in all, a competent if fairly standard, contents arrived with the DS1621+ NAS.

Synology DS1621+ NAS Review – Design

The design of the Synology DS1621+ Diskstation is one that we have already seen a couple of times in the last 2 years since this chassis was first revealed. Dedicating the bulk of the available physical space to the six storage bays, it is an impressively designed and attractive casing that will not look too shabby stored away privately or open in your desktop environment.

The front of the DS1621+ casing features very few details and is designed to appear sleek but nondescript. Synology has never really favoured ‘LCD panels’ or more direct localised interaction with their products, favouring network or internet communication between users and their hardware. That said, there is a series of LED lights dotted around the top of the frame to denote system access, activity and network traffic to each of the available LAN ports on this device.

Aside from those LEDs, the bulk of the front of the DS1621+ is dominated by the 6 individual SATA storage bays. These bays can be populated by 3.5 inch and 2.5 inch storage media, with each bay having it own LED to denote drive activity.

The system can be populated by as little as one storage drive or can be fully populated on day one as the user’s storage requirements and budget dictate. Currently, the largest commercial available NAS and server hard drives are available in up to 18TB (Terabytes) and solid-state drives at around 4TB and 8TB pending on performance and durability.

Each tray features a locking mechanism, that is partially spring-loaded to allow easy hot-swapping of drives in the event of RAID rebuild situations. Additionally, each bay is screwless in design for hard drive media, allowing users to install drives in seconds as well as providing screws for 2.5″ media to be used.

The trays themselves are plastic in material and over the years Synology has improved these designs substantially to a point where the long-term difference between these plastic trays and their metal counterparts are near enough inconsequential. The DS1621+ allows you to install multiple drives in a RAID environment that is supported internally by the Synology system, as well as support of Synology’s own hybrid RAID system, SHR. SHR support on this device is important for some, as it is one of the more popular storage features that Synology provide to their users that allows you to mix and match your drives to get the best RAID configuration possible from that setup. Most users rarely mix drives on day 1 of deploying their storage system, but years down the line the ability to introduce larger drives to your RAID system that may be running out of space is exceptionally useful. SHR support on the DS1621+ is something that is absent on the arguable more power (and expansive) DS1621xs+.

At the very base of the DS1621+ NAS, discreetly hidden on the bottom corner, is a USB 3 port for connecting external storage devices and a limited number of supported peripherals. I have long been an advocate of adding local USB-storage as another tier in your existing backup strategy, however, these USB port can also be used for regularly backing up storage you use on-the-fly via external drives and flash USB keys (eg students, photographers, etc). Further back up options with USB storage are available with several backup applications included with the Synology NAS software included with this device (eg Hyper Backup, Active Backup, USB-Copy).

An important factor in any 24/7 system is that of maintaining operational temperatures internally. Along with twin active cooling fans that I will touch on later, the DS1621+ also features the Synology branded mesh vents on either side of the chassis. These have always been a pleasing design choice from the brand, very slick and a discrete but important layer of passive cooling working in conjunction with the active cooling on the rear.

As I said, the Synology DS1621+ NAS is a compact but well-designed NAS in terms of its physical stature, but it is worth highlighting that a largely metal external casing like this will generally produce a little bit more background noise whilst in operation. The majority of noise that this system will generate can largely be blamed on the storage media you choose to install inside and the quality of their build (those clicks, hums and whirs), but an external metal housing will tend to amplify these things a pinch more. Nevertheless, if you plan on setting this up out of sight, or just generally do not plan to be in close proximity with it regularly, this can largely be overlooked and the benefits of metal architecture to help dissipate heat in general use is also a bonus. Let’s take a look at how you connect to the device.

Synology DS1621+ NAS Review – Ports & Connections

Compared with its predecessor, the Synology DS1621+ is near enough identical at a glance to that of the DS1618+ in its ports and connections. On the one hand, it still features a great amount of connectivity and upgradeability in your physical network environment. On the other, many will argue that improvements could still have been made in this newest generation too.

Continuing with the metal physical design, the rear of the DS1621+ features a large ventilated panel and two active cooling fans to regulate the temperature of the system as needed.

These rear cooling fans are able to have their operational speeds increased or decreased as the system requires, both automatically or manually. it is highly recommended that you do not adjust these manually as it may worsen overall performance in the long term, but those particularly sensitive to the humming of fans will welcome this small degree of control over them. The same amount of control is also afforded to the LED lights, that can have their brightness easily adjusted.

As expected from this series from Synology, the DS1621+ features four RJ45 network ports that can be connected to your existing switch or router individually, or combined in supported setups for link aggregation (port trunking) or to maintain a failover system. As this system arrives with Gigabit Ethernet architecture on these ports, via link aggregation you can reach speeds in excess of 400-440MB/s, but it is reliant on you having a smart managed network architecture in order to set this up. There is no avoiding that some of Synology’s more critical audience will bemoan the use of 1Gbe in 2020, with many of their rivals now adopting 2.5Gbe and 5Gbe at this price point. Synology does have a 6-bay 10Gbe alternative in the DS1621xs+, but as this NAS arrives at almost twice the price of the DS1621+ (largely down to further benefits of the xs series) that is quite a large jump to make to get greater than gigabit ethernet connectivity. It is a shame that Synology is not embracing these greater van 1Gbe connections on Diskstation devices as much as other brands, and even if you argue that a 6 base system provides limited throughput to fully saturate a wider bandwidth, it is still enough to fill up these larger network connections for multiple users and once.

The DS1621+ also features two additional USB ports for connecting peripherals and external storage devices. These ports also can be used for integrating UPS fail-safe devices in your network office environment, support of making non-network accessible devices network available (such as printers and scanners) and a small range of network adaptor upgrades are also supported. As touched on previously, these do not support peripheral control devices like keyboards and mice, largely due to the DS1621+ not having a visual output to combine these with, so no KVM support.

The DS1621+, like many of the Synology Plus series devices, also features expandability in its storage potential with the connection of up to an additional 10x SATA storage bays via two DX517 expansion slots (eSATA based). This is a handy feature for those users who, within the device lifespan, notice this storage capacity diminish, but do not wish to purchase a new system and invariably have to reinvent network paths, backup routines and reinstall an entire multi-user access system for the clients or colleagues. These expansion ports work quickly and easily, allowing users to gradually increase their overall storage outside of the main host system. Though some users might argue that the expansion range of desktop devices from Synology seems a tad limited, at either a 5-Bay or 12-Bay expansion system for desktop and even then, only the 5 Bay being supported on this device. Alot of this can be blamed on larger expansion systems requiring larger connections to the host system, which in turn needs to be a consideration at the chipset level, so expansions are not an easy subject to tackle at the best of times.

Already mentioned, the DS1621+ features an internal PSU, at 250W. Of course, this is a maximum and Synology reports 55.21W usage while in operation 25.27W whilst in standby, which is pretty reasonable for a 6 Drive storage system. Additional power consumption provisions are likely to be PCIe upgrade cards, increased SSD cache modules and memory, as well as the increases to internal factors in cooling that they present. As mentioned, the Synology DS1621+ can also be upgraded in its external connections via the installation of network interface cards (NIC) in the available PCIe slot. Arriving in a PCIe Gen 3 x8 configuration, it means that the Synology DS1621+ supports some impressive bandwidth boosting enabled cards. Synology provides several first-party upgrade cards that add one or two more 10Gbe to your storage system and thanks to the excellent choice of PCIe architecture and the CPU inside the DS1621+, you will get a great deal of performance out of the right storage media in those 6 bays. Additionally, there are several third-party cards available to add 20Gbe and 40Gbe connectivity to this desktop NAS, although you will struggle to populate this system with enough storage media to fully saturate that kind of top-end bandwidth realistically.

As this system already arrives with twin NVMe SSD cache bays by default, there is no need to consider installing the Synology E10M20-T1 combo card (unsupported) as you will not be able to take advantage of those additional NVMe bays. Luckily, this neatly frees you up to take advantage of twin improved NIC upgrades. Overall, at a casual glance, the DS1621+ does not seemingly provide much improvement over the DS1618+ device that came before, but it is how the improved internal specifications improve the performance and experience of applications and connected users that we should really focus on.

Synology DS1621+ NAS Review – Internal Hardware

The internal hardware that Synology have selected for the DS1621+ 6-bay NAS is an interesting combination of new architecture combined with staples of this particular series. Of course, the main area of difference that many including myself have focused on is that new CPU that is featured in this NAS device.

The new DS1621+ arrives with the Ryzen V1500B AMD processor, effectively the first time the biggest brand in NAS has made the switch away from Intel processors in this series. Although technically not a full and complete Ryzen (comparable with that of the more market famous Ryzen 3 5 and 7), this more efficient and server optimised processor is designed for long-term, always-on utilisation, while simultaneously performing tasks with a lower resource consumption than other Ryzen CPU. This kind of design is pivotal in NAS hardware, as typical components found in desktop computers will generate far more heat from unnecessary power utilisation that is a real barrier in network-attached storage architecture long term. This processor (and the rest of the Ryzen embedded family) unlike the rest of the premium Ryzen family, integrate the chipset into the chip itself, and it is through this unique architecture that it can be more efficient and server optimised.

Just to keep things relative, this processor is not going to challenge the likes of an Intel core (i3/i5/i7) processor, however, it is a noticeably higher performance CPU than that of the Intel C3538 Atom that the DS1618+ before it featured, at near enough the same price point. chiefly, this new AMD processor of choice allows you to use less power comparatively to complete the same tasks and therefore ultimately allows you to do much more with the resources at hand in the newer DS1621+ device. Neither DS1621+ nor DS1618+ Synology NAS has a GPU embedded processor, which is fairly normal for this product series and may leave some buyers a little disappointed, as the smaller 4 and 5 bay devices arrive with Intel Celeron processors embedded graphics. But this needs to be offset against the typical CPU abilities in more day to day data management tasks. This processor also opens the door to DDR4 ECC memory and the DS1621+ supports up to 32GB across two SODIMM slots in the base of the NAS chassis.

It is worth highlighting that the Synology DS1621+, much like the rest of the range from this brand, is designed to only support official Synology memory modules and they provide several different capacities in their range. There is an area of contention for many users on utilising unofficial or official memory, but Synology steadfast maintain that users should not be utilising configurations and that include unsupported memory at the risk of an unstable system long term – in short, they cannot provide support on an unsupported configuration and therefore cannot ensure your data is safe.

Nevertheless, the maximum supported 32GB of memory is still pretty impressive for this NAS and for those looking at moderate virtual machine deployment for their staff, a well equipped and expandable surveillance solution, a collaboration platform for users to work together on, a multi-tiered backup system – or ALL of the above, the DS1621+ works as an impressive base device to surround with your existing network architecture. Memory upgrades are not the only means with which users can improve the performance of individual applications and fluidity of user storage on this device, as Synology has equipped the DS1621+ with additional SSD cache upgradability in line with the majority of 2020/2021 solutions in their portfolio.

These two NVMe SSD bays allow you to install all two high-speed m.2 media modules that allow you to leverage the high IOPS and read-write that  Solid State Drives feature towards the larger (but typically slower) hard drive RAID storage array of the six main bays. The benefits of SSD caching are typically found in smaller file exchanges, more frequently accessed files being copied ad-hoc onto the cache storage and is particularly useful in shared drive spaces between teams, either as network drives, iSCSI/LUN targets or using the popular Synology drive client applications in conjunction with the NAS. Unsurprisingly, Synology still maintains that these m.2 NVMe slots can only be used for SSD caching and not raw storage, which is a shame given the internal hardware of this device. Nevertheless, Synology has really embraced SSD caching over these last few years and fair play to them, they do it better than everyone else right now. Even when comparing NVMe SSD vs SATA SSD in caching, the system’s in the Synology portfolio do seemingly take advantage of the additional performance.

Synology DS1621+ NAS Review – Software

You will be pleased to know that the upgrades in the Synology DS1621+ NAS of that Ryzen powered processor, over that of the Intel Atom, mean that to the entire Synology application range is available to you and in all cases, you will get faster performance and larger simultaneous access than previously. The Synology range of NAS devices all features the same software, in DSM 6.2 (DSM 7 beta hopefully around the corner). What separates them is the extent to which it can run the software, both in terms of which applications and to what extent. This is often governed by the memory and CPU inside and the DS1621+ NAS is no exception. If you currently own a DS1618+ NAS from Synology, then chances are that the Synology DS1621+ NAS will have little or nothing that you have not seen before. Likewise, the higher tier DS1621xs+ (which features a more powerful CPU in the Intel Xeon), this quad-core processor in the DS1621+ does not present a massive upgrade to you. In terms of scaling between the new and older device. However, for those looking for a robust storage NAS with RAID coverage and internal hardware that will stand the test of time, the newer NAS represents a great starting block for your network-attached storage system and in a straight comparison, wins in almost every way.  It unsurprisingly arrives with all the software advantages available on a modern NAS, thanks to the Diskstation Manager (DSM) platform currently in version 6.2.2 and DSM 7.0 soon to be available towards the end of the year. The DS1621+ NAS supports a multitude of first-party applications and third-party apps for home and business use, such as:

A full software review of the DSM 6.2 platform on the DS1621xs+ NAS is currently in process and I hope to have this to you here on the blog very soon or on the YouTube channel in due course. Stay tuned.

Synology DS1621+ NAS Review – Conclusion

Whether you’re looking at buying the new Synology DS1621+ as your first footsteps into the world of NAS, or as an upgrade to your existing smaller network-attached storage system, the DS1621+ ticks practically every box. Although some might argue that the hardware might seem almost a little too mid-range, they are missing the point of this device entirely. The DS1621+ is a prime example of everything that Synology is about and frankly, if you love the brand you will love this NAS device. Finding a fair middle ground internally and externally at this price point, the DS1621+ represents Synology doubling down on hardware R&D over the last 2 years and is largely successful in every way. It would have been nice to see a more graphically equipped processor, or something a tad closer in architecture to that of the comparatively powerhouse DS1621xs +, but right now this is the best Synology 6 bay you are going to find and without breaking the bank. 

The Synology ‘Plus’ series of devices has long held a reputation for providing mid-range hardware to mid-range business customers. Because of this, the DS1621+ needs to balance a fine line between providing fast and reliable hardware, whilst still maintaining a price point that won’t intimidate the average small-medium business user. In this regard, I think the Synology DS1621+ NAS gets it right, finding an impressive halfway point between these two factors. However, it is important for buyers to understand what they are buying and where the budget for the Synology DS1621+ is being aimed. Although it seemingly lacks some of the multimedia and prosumer features of ‘cheaper’ NAS devices in the Synology portfolio, it doubles down on more business and enterprise-level features in efforts to support that core audience. It’s about getting the right tool for the job and in that area, Synology almost completely succeed. The lack of +gigabit connectivity afforded to a NAS unit at this price point, compared with their competitors, may put some users off, but on the whole, you are getting good performance and excellent value on this combined hardware and software solution with some excellent scalability.

 

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