Our testing found the overall performance of the DS1621+ excellent, and it has plenty of grunt to run a wide variety of apps, host virtual machines, manage a IP camera system and more at the same time. The NAS was able to saturate a 1gBE connection no matter what else we had it doing, peaking at 729 Mbps reading and 710 Mbps writing. With the 10 GbE PCIe connection, it hit 3889 Mbps reading, and 2146Mbps writing, which is getting closer to the limits of the drive array.

What's most notable, though, is that it's basically the DS1621+ plus two drive bays. The two share the same hardware specs -- both are the firsts from Synology that use an AMD Ryzen quad-core CPU. The DS1621+ comes populated with 4GB of ECC DDR4 in one slot of two slots, and can support up to 32GB. Despite the higher price, it’s great to see the ECC RAM used for improved protection against data corruption. User-defined temperature settings are stored in nonvolatile memory so parts may be programmed prior to insertion in a system. Temperature settings and temperature readings are all communicated to/from the DS1621 over a simple two–wire serial interface.

Ultimate file management and sharing

PCIe add-in cards, expansion units, and storage drives are sold separately. Refer to the compatibility list for compatible devices. If you're mulling over the two, that is the only point you should consider. Synology DS1821+ vs DS1621+: Hardware specifications Model For performance testing, we installed four of Toshiba’s new air-filled 4TB MG08-D series of hard disks. These are aimed specifically at business users that are more focused on cost and reliability, and don’t need the massive capacities of helium-filled spinners. To test caching efficacy, we fitted two 480GB Kingston DC1000B enterprise-class M.2 NVMe SSDs and although neither these nor the Toshiba drives feature on Synology’s compatibility list, the DSM software allowed us to use them.

And finally, the servers have a PCIe slot for an add-on card. In this case, you can use it to add 10Gbps connectivity to the servers -- another must if you're into Multi-Gig.The more is always, the better in terms of capacity, but generally, you won't need drives larger than 250GB for caching. For my case, though, I used the first option for my DS1821+ and the third for my DS1621+ -- two ports are always better than one. But no matter which card you get, the installation is the same. Extra: Synology DS1621+ to DS1821+ in-place upgrade