Synology DS415play Is A NAS Designed For Entertainment

Synology seems to have an endless train of NAS boxes, each designed to address different use cases and market segments. This latest model, the Disk Station DS415play, is no different. Building up on the DS214play unveiled last year, this NAS boasts of 4 drive bays that will ensure that your videos, music, and photos are well accommodated for streaming and sharing with friends and family, whether it be locally or over the Internet.

Those four bays are really the DS415play's call to fame. Since each bay is capable of holding up to 6 TB in storage, you theoretically have a storage capacity of up to 24 TB, limited only by your choice of RAID type. And speaking of RAID, in a RAID 5 setup on Windows, the DS415play is capable of max speeds of 112.45 MB/s on read and 101.21 MB/s on write.

In almost all other hardware aspects, the DS415play and its DS214play predecessor are pretty much alike. This means the same 1.6 GHz dual-core processor and 1 GB of RAM. The latest model, however, does have a higher power draw at 17.30 watts on idle and 41.95 watts when active. The DS415play is capable of transcoding Full HD videos on the fly, supporting formats such as H.264, MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-2, and VC-1.

In terms of software, it runs the latest Disk Station Manager or DSM 5.0, the same popular Linux-based OS that has made Synology's NAS devices easy to setup and use. It supports streaming to a variety of devices such as Apple TV and practically anY DLNA-compatible device. And as of March this year, Synology added support for streaming to Google's Chromecast dongle.

The Synology DS415play NAS is now available for purchase from various Synology retail partners. The box does cost $540, which might be a bit pricey given its almost incremental improvement over the DS214play, which costs $350 only. But if you are truly in need of those 2 extra drive bays, then this might be the NAS to keep an eye on.

SOURCE: Synology