Synology’s 8-bay desktop NAS appliances have always been popular choices for small businesses thanks to their high storage capacity and features. The DS1819+ impressed us sufficiently to receive a coveted Simply.Reviews Top 10 award but in keeping with Synology’s two-year refresh cycle, it now gets its marching orders.
On the surface, the new DS1821+ looks almost identical but what lies beneath reveals a radical change in direction for Synology. Up until now, all its 8-bay desktop models have used Intel CPUs but the DS1821+ is one of a range of new appliances from Synology that are powered by AMD.
click to enlarge
The DS1821+ employs a quad-core 2.2GHz AMD Ryzen V1500B CPU and as you’ll see in our performance tests, it delivers a significant speed boost over the 2.1GHz Atom C3538 in the DS1819+. Memory capacity hasn’t changed though, as the DS1821+ still comes with a base 4GB of ECC DDR4 upgradeable to 32GB.
Another noteworthy addition are the two embedded M.2 NVMe SSD slots lurking in the side panel. Previously, you had to use one of Synology’s add-in cards if you wanted SSD caching and this welcome hardware update frees up the PCI-E slot for network upgrades.
Build quality and hardware features
There are no changes in the chassis department as the DS1821+ uses the same sturdy charcoal-black steel box as all its predecessors. Cooling is handled by a pair of large 12cms diameter fans at the rear and their low noise levels make this appliance a great choice for a small office.
click to enlarge
Synology is still ignoring multi-Gigabit so the DS1821+ offers the same quartet of Gigabit ports. The four USB ports are now the 3.2 Gen 1 variety and you have dual eSATA ports for expanding capacity outside the box using two Synology DX517 5-bay desktop units.
The M.2 slots are easily accessed by removing the left-most drive carriers where you’ll find them near the front. For testing, we fitted a pair of 480GB Kingston DC1000B enterprise-class NVMe SSDs and although they aren’t on Synology’s compatibility list, worked without any problems.
No such luck with the PCI-E slot as Synology has started removing support for many third-party 10GbE adapters in favour of its own. We installed the same Emulex dual-port 10GbE card we’d used to test the DS1819+ but the DS1821+ failed to boot up and would only accept a dual-port Intel X520 10GbE adapter.
10GbE performance and comparison
For NAS performance testing, we mapped a share over 10GbE to a Dell T640 Xeon Scalable host running Windows Server 2019. For the DS1821+, Iometer reported sequential read and write rates of 9.2Gbits/sec and 8.7Gbits/sec whereas the DS1819+ delivered the same read speed but a significantly lower 4.8Gbits/sec write rate.
The DS1821+ handled our real world tests slightly better with copies of a 25GB file delivering read and write rates of
click to enlarge
5Gbits/sec and 4.1Gbits/sec while our backup test averaged 2.6Gbits/sec. However, copying the 25GB test file to an encrypted NAS folder showed AMD to be the winner with it averaging 2.6Gbits/sec – a 63% improvement over the DS1819+.
IP SAN 10GbE performance using a 500GB iSCSI target showed more improvements with the DS1821+ delivering the same Iometer read rate of 9.2Gbits/sec but a 72% increase for write operation to 8.6Gbits/sec. Differences became even more apparent with a dual 10GbE MPIO link to the iSCSI target with the DS1821+ returning read and write speeds of 18.4Gbits/sec and 8.7Gbits/sec – the DS1819+ only managed 12.6Gbits/sec and 5.1Gbits/sec.
If you want to install NVMe SSDs bear in mind they can only be used as a cache and not as a separate storage pool and you’ll only see any worthwhile improvements to random operations. Using the 10GbE MPIO link to the iSCSI target and Iometer set to 4K blocks, we recorded random read and write rates of 74,800 IOPS and 3,650 IOPS without caching and with a mirrored cache assigned to the storage pool, watched these numbers increase to 82,200 IOPS and 44,300 IOPS.
DSM 6.2 features
Its high capacity makes the DS1821+ extremely versatile and well suited to a wide range of business duties. It’s ideal as a video recording vault and Synology’s Surveillance Station 8.2 app seals the deal as it’s packed with sophisticated features.
click to enlarge
It supports over 7,600 IP camera models and offers a remarkable range of video recording and management services. A favorite of ours is the LiveCam iOS app as we use it on our iPad to send live video and audio streams directly to the Surveillance Station console and record them.
Access security has been stiffened up as the DSM default admin account is disabled with the quick start wizard now requiring you to create a new unique one. The free Antivirus Essentials app provides scheduled malware scanning services of on-appliance data while the Security Advisor app looks for weaknesses such as easily guessed passwords or open network ports and provides advice on locking them down.
click to enlarge
The DS1821+ excels as a backup repository as the free Active Backup Suite includes Active Backup for Business (ABB) for protecting data on Windows workstations and servers plus VMware and Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs), a second separate app for Microsoft 365 and a third for Google Workspace. You can easily protect all data on the appliance too, as the Snapshot Replication app runs manual and scheduled snapshots of BTFRS volumes while the Hyper Backup app provides a single console for managing all local, remote, Rsync, cloud and iSCSI LUN backups.
Conclusion
The DS1821+ is a great choice for home office users and SMBs that want a high storage capacity teamed up with good performance and plenty of room to expand. The move to an AMD CPU has paid off as it’s faster than its Atom-powered predecessor, it has plenty of power to run all of Synology’s DSM apps and with a diskless unit costing around $990, it’s also good value.
