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Today for testing we have the new Synology 2-bay flagship NAS on hand, the DiskStation DS716+. Armed with Intel’s latest low powered quad-core system-on-chip the DS716+ boasts support for AES-NI encryption and on the fly H.264 4K to 1080p video transcoding. The real party trick of the DS716+ is its support for EXT4 and more importantly BTRFS... Having recently reviewed Asustor’s new AS6202T, a 2-bay NAS sporting Intel’s Celeron N3150 system-on-chip using the Braswell architecture, we thought it about time Synology’s offering got the once over.
 The DiskStation DS716+ also boasts the powerful Celeron N3150, providing four cores working at 1.6GHz with built-in support for hardware encryption and H.264 encoding. Surprisingly for such a high-end 2-bay NAS, Synology has only equipped the DS716+ with 2GB of RAM out of the box and we struggle to understand this given today’s memory prices. Still, while the DS716+ might only feature as much system memory as the AS6202T, it has one significant advantage that we are very excited about. Recently Synology updated their world class DiskStation manager software to version 6.0 and with it they introduced support for the BTRFS file system for the first time on a Synology NAS. Only select models support BTRFS at this point and most of them are the high-end enterprise products, which makes the DS716+ a bit special. BTRFS is a relatively new file system, a feature-rich filesystem that prioritizes data integrity over performance. That’s great for enterprise solutions, but in the past we have found it cripples the performance of lower end NAS devices, such as the Netgear ReadyNAS series. We first tested BTRFS using the ReadyNAS RN102 and the performance was horrible thanks to the Marvell Armada 370. The more expensive RN312 didn’t perform nearly as poorly thanks to its Intel Atom D2700 processor, that said it was still slower than similar spec devices using the older EXT4 file system. Until now Synology has exclusively used the latest of the EXT-based filesystems and this has been the default choice for many Linux distributions. BTRFS is seen as being the next step, but it is not a successor to the default EXT4 file system. That said, it can be expected to replace EXT4 in the future. Theodore Ts’o, a maintainer for EXT3 and EXT4 has stated that he sees BTRFS as a better way forward than continuing to rely on the EXT* technology.
 A key advantage of BTRFS is that it can support up to sixteen times the data of EXT4, and that’s a lot. However keep in mind EXT4 can address over a million terabytes in a single partition. So then home users don’t really need to be concerned with the storage limitation of the EXT4 filesystem, various enterprises on the other hand do. Interestingly while Netgear limits users to BTRFS, Synology’s implementation is considerably more flexible and DS716+ owners will have their choice of BTRFS or EXT4. Therefore we will be testing the DS716+ using both file systems, it will be interesting to see how they compare performance wise. |
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AutoD |
Posted on: 12/17/2015 11:05 AM
BTRFS ... about time  |
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david Wheeler |
Posted on: 12/18/2015 05:50 PM
where did you get the beta for the 716+ |
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ProX |
Posted on: 12/20/2015 05:44 PM
Nice review thanks, I have to do more reading on BTRFS now |
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Photoguy |
Posted on: 01/06/2016 12:02 PM
I just mine a few days ago and I am loving it! |
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Leviez |
Posted on: 01/31/2016 11:36 PM
Can you review the DS216+ please, I am looking at purchasing one soon. |
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ProX |
Posted on: 02/18/2016 03:15 AM
So will you be testing the DS216+? It also supports BTRFS but is a lot cheaper. |