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Apr 26, 2024

Synology DiskStation DS1522+ review

It's great at just about everything but being a Plex server NAS systems have long been common appliances in businesses and the homes of cable cutters. They’ve grown even more popular over the last few

It's great at just about everything but being a Plex server

NAS systems have long been common appliances in businesses and the homes of cable cutters. They’ve grown even more popular over the last few years as many professionals shifted to working from home, while others have chosen to move their files to private storage rather than rely on cloud services. Synology’s new DS1522+ is a high-performance model designed for small businesses, video editors, and many data hoarders.

The latest entrant in Synology’s NAS lineup, the DiskStation DS1522+, tries to bridge the gap between the DS920+ and the uber-expensive DS1621+. On the DS1522+, you get a total of four 1GbE LAN ports, enabling link aggregation or wired connection with a bunch of computers in your office. The best part is that the NAS comes with a (proprietary) slot where you can add a 10GbE network port as a separate purchase, keeping the cost low for those who don’t need a faster port — while still giving power users an upgrade option.

Compared to its direct predecessor, the DS1522+ gets a bump to a more powerful dual-core AMD processor, which is made for taxing business environments. And with 8GB of standard RAM (upgradable to a whopping 32GB), you can run virtual machines and server apps all you want. But without a GPU, don’t expect it to transcode your videos on the fly, although streaming already transcoded media shouldn’t be an issue.

The DS1522+ shares the same utilitarian look that’s common among almost every NAS on the market. There’s no fancy faceplate or ornamentation; it’s just a simple metal box with a textured matte black finish. The front panel is dominated by five drive bays with cover plates, and to the right side is a panel with status indicators for each drive, a USB A 3.2 gen 1 port, and the power button at the bottom.

Drives can be hot-swapped by lifting the cover plate from the bottom to form a handle, then pulling out the whole caddy. Synology’s drive caddies employ a screwless mounting system for 3.5-inch HDDs with plastic pegs that press through into the mounting holes in the drive, making swaps pretty fast and convenient. The caddies also have rubber standoffs to slightly reduce vibration, which do help, but it doesn’t prevent the whole enclosure from shaking or rattling a little.

I solved this easily enough by putting a moderately heavy object on top. Smaller 2.5-inch drives can also be loaded into the caddies, but they require screws to hold them in position. Each drive bay can be locked with a small hex key to prevent accidental removal.

Both sides of the enclosure have cutouts in the shape of the Synology name to allow more airflow. They’re covered with a tight metal mesh to keep larger dust particles and debris from getting inside, but these grills tend to capture a lot of dust. So, it’s good to clean them occasionally.

The rear of the enclosure has a pair of 92mm fans mounted across the top, and all the remaining ports are spread evenly across the bottom. These include two eSATA ports for adding expansion NAS units, four 1Gb Ethernet ports (which support Link Aggregation), and the second USB 3.2 Type-A port.

I do feel a little disappointed that this model is shipping with only 1Gb Ethernet ports out of the box, and a single slot for a relatively pricey 10Gb port — more on that below. While this probably doesn’t matter to most home users, where computers and networking equipment are unlikely to have been upgraded to support speeds above 1Gb, some competitors have been shipping NAS boxes with 2.5Gb and 5Gb ports by default. For small offices and high-demand users, multiple faster ports can be important — and even for home users, a little future-proofing is never a bad thing.

In addition to the NAS enclosure with caddies for each bay, the box contains an AC power adapter and cord, two RJ-45 CAT 5e cables, screws for mounting 2.5-inch drives, and a pair of keys for locking the caddies in position to prevent accidental removals.

While all the standard ports are limited to 1Gb, there is also a cutout located between the eSATA and Ethernet ports that hides a pair of internal PCIe 3.0 ports. At this time, Synology offers just one product to fill this space: the E10G22-T1-Mini card, a 10Gb network adapter that retails for $150. There’s good reason to get excited about multiplying your network transfer speeds by a factor of ten, but it takes a bit more investment to get the most out of that connection.

First, you obviously need a 10Gb network adapter for your computer, and possibly a similarly capable network switch if you’re not connecting a single computer directly to the NAS. Of course, the 10Gb port is also compatible with 2.5Gb and 5Gb connections, which is good if you already have compatible hardware and don’t care to upgrade any other hardware right away. You likely also need to consider how quickly the drives can deliver data. It’s important to install high-performance hard drives designed for a NAS and set them up in a striped RAID configuration for faster reads and writes.

Depending on the types of files and how many people are accessing the NAS, seek performance may become a bottleneck. To resolve this, the DS1522+ also has a compartment in the bottom where two matching M.2 NVMe sticks can be installed to operate as a cache for higher performance. Be aware; if only one stick is installed, or there are two mismatched sticks, the cache operates in read-only mode to serve data more efficiently, but the NVMe drive won’t be used to cache write operations.

The 1522+ is equipped with the brand new AMD Ryzen R1600 processor, a substantial step up in power compared to the Celeron J4124 processor of the previous generation, or other Atom processors that have been popular in many recent NAS boxes. This is more in line with the models targeting enterprise customers, which makes it well-suited for running an internal web server or other reasonably demanding applications.

Unfortunately for Plex users, there’s no integrated GPU, which would have been present if the V1605B processor had been used instead. A decent GPU is crucial for efficiently transcoding video on the fly, especially at the higher resolutions.

However, this isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker. If all of your video is encoded in a codec that’s natively supported by all of your playback devices (e.g. television, set-top box, phone), it’s fairly safe to turn off transcoding and allow Plex to serve the files directly. For example, all the videos I tested were encoded in h264 or h265, and they play perfectly on my Shield TV connected to a Sony Bravia television — no transcoding necessary. And while re-encoding a full library of videos may be a very time-consuming hassle, the results tend to look better than live transcoding anyway.

The DS1522+ comes with 8 GB RAM, but it can be upgraded to a maximum of 32GB of DDR4 ECC Unbuffered SODIMM. For somebody that’s only looking for a NAS to be a file server, there’s really no need for more than 8GB; it won’t impact performance at all. However, if you’re going to run a few heavier applications, virtual machines, or a web server that will operate under some moderate load, it may be worth installing more.

The 1Gb ports maintain perfectly good network performance, and I saw no degradation in speed with four computers connected to each of the ports, even with just two drives installed. Unfortunately, I don’t have an adapter to push the 10Gb module to its limits, but even at half of the theoretical max speed of 1.25MB/s (assuming absolutely perfect conditions), it can move roughly double the data of the highest speed SATA drives on the market. This should be plenty for video editors to have a mostly seamless experience working with 4K footage straight from the NAS.

And if you’re going to be using this in an office to serve a lot of computers, or perhaps it just makes sense for your home use, Synology supports link aggregation across all four 1Gb ports for more consistent performance to each client.

All Synology NAS boxes run a version of DiskStation Manager (DSM), a full operating system with a web-based interface that will be comfortably familiar to any Windows or Mac user. This acts as the management console to control networking, storage, and other settings. It can even run custom applications, for which there is a fairly good ecosystem of software to choose from. The experience is pretty polished and easy to use.

The DS1522+ ships with DSM 7.1, a pleasant upgrade from my previous NAS running DSM 6.2. There are many subtle changes, but it will be instantly familiar for anybody coming from the previous version. The differences mostly involve polishing the graphics and rearranging some settings into more logical categories. It’s also a bit more responsive, but I’m not sure if that’s a result of software improvements or just a faster processor.

The initial setup process can usually take just a few minutes and doesn’t require any special software; you can just open find.synology.com in a browser and follow the instructions. This can be done over Wi-Fi or Ethernet on your local network. However, if anything interferes with the automated process, you may need to connect a computer directly to one of the Ethernet ports for a few minutes to complete the setup process. I’m also a pedantic person, so I took another half hour or so to run through every conceivable setting. Still, most people can move on to transferring files and installing apps.

App installation is done through the Package Center, a tool that contains a long list of apps, much like the Play Store or App Store on a smartphone. You can also install app packages manually, sort of like sideloading an APK to an Android phone.

The app selection is among the best reasons to buy a Synology NAS. There are too many first-party apps to discuss in detail here, but the crowd favorite tends to be the Synology Photos app. It can be a pretty solid alternative to Google Photos, including both automatic facial recognition and a polished smartphone app. For more utilitarian purposes, Synology Drive matches Google Drive in many ways, making it a great utility for storing and sharing files with other people.

In addition to a few of the apps provided by Synology and its partners, I also set up a web server for testing, a git server, a couple of development frameworks that I need to run scripts, and even a custom Discord bot. Most of these things require some experience to configure properly, but a NAS is a great place to run services that need to be accessible by several people and require constant uptime.

Yes, but not necessarily this one. The DS1522+ is a powerful and flexible NAS that can be a great choice, particularly for video editors and small businesses. The Ryzen R1600 CPU, especially with as much as 32GB of RAM, enables higher-than-average performance to run virtual machines and servers. And naturally, it’s a great file server, but it can really shine in high-demand environments with the optional 10Gb Ethernet add-on.

While this model is ideal as a general-purpose server for a professional working at home, the lack of a GPU is its single biggest weakness, making it harder to recommend to potential Plex users. If you need high-performance transcoding or want to avoid manually re-encoding videos to play on your target devices, check out some of Synology’s other great NAS enclosures.

A big part of Synology’s value proposition comes from the DiskStation Manager software, which is easy to set up and requires very little maintenance, plus a wide selection of first and third-party apps that enable a lot of other services. But if you’re just looking for a file server, a QNAP NAS may be a better value since some newer models come standard with 2.5Gb Ethernet ports while maintaining lower prices, or it may be worth considering a desktop computer if the intention is focused more on running an application server.

Both models are designed to target fairly similar users, generally aiming for small office and production environments. Each has a high-performance Ryzen CPU and can be upgraded to 32 GB of RAM. Neither is equipped with a GPU, leaving them in a questionable position as media servers. While the DS1522+ supports up to five drives and the option to install a 10Gb Ethernet port, the DS1621+ steps up to six drives and allows for installing as many as four 10Gb (or two 25Gb) Ethernet ports through an array of eight PCIe 3.0 slots. The DS1522+ is pricey at $700, but the expandability of the DS1621+ will cost a bit more at $900.

The DS420+ is more like the premium at-home media server, containing four drive bays, two 1Gb Ethernet ports, a base of 4GB RAM (expandable to 8GB), and the always convenient GPU for video transcoding. Unfortunately, it lacks any method to get a 10Gb Ethernet port. These specs make it viable as a moderate-load application server, but rule out most high-demand file access for video editors and the like. For a more approachable $550, the DS920+ is a great high-capacity media server for the home with plenty of capability for professional use. Still, the specs put a much lower ceiling on its capabilities than the faster processor and increased RAM in the DS1522+.

Like Synology, QNAP offers a large selection of NAS systems with enough variations to suit most customers. The QNAP TS-473A and DS1522+ are similarly priced at $779 and $700, respectively. QNAP also built this model on an AMD Ryzen chip, but used a V1500B instead. It’s an older processor but includes a GPU suitable for live transcoding. Both models ship with 8GB of RAM, though QNAP can upgrade up to 64GB versus Synology’s 32GB ceiling. Both provide 2x M.2 PCIe slots for cache drives and similar ports. The DS1522+ has the advantage on drive slots with one more than the QNAP model.

Aside from the GPU, the layout of Ethernet ports may be the biggest difference. Synology can serve more computers directly with its four 1Gb Ethernet ports, but QNAP can claim a win on speed with a pair of 2.5Gb ports — and both units can be upgraded to include a 10Gb Ethernet port. While Synology’s DSM software is considered the best in the market with a large app ecosystem, QNAP includes most of the same features and many of the same apps.

Cody has been a contributor to Android Police for nearly ten years. While best known for writing hundreds of APK Teardowns and breaking news on many of Google’s new products and services, he also covers deeper technical topics about the inner workings of Android, app development, and security. Cody is a software engineer and consultant with two decades of experience developing mobile and enterprise applications. He has written code for quite a few projects within the Android community, in addition to working with many companies, including Microsoft and Intel. In addition to writing, Cody is a regular podcaster and has made appearances on CNN, All About Android, and Tech News Today. Cody is also an active photographer and videographer, occasional gamer, and an all-around decent human.