Once the screws are removed slide the two sides of the NAS apart so it opens.Īlso note that the drives are labelled 1 and 2. I tend to do drive replacements in the evening to allow the rebuild to happen while I sleep. The Synology NAS will be usable but there might be a performance hit. It will take several hours to rebuild the volume once the drive is replaced. In addition, the replacement disks have to be the same size or larger than the existing drives. With just two disks of the same size this is a mirrored volume similar to RAID 1. All that was needed was a Phillips 2 screwdriver. A three-year warranty has been included, and around an additional $100 will get you their EW201 bundle, which extends it to five years.Replacing hard drives is super-simple in a Synology NAS, even one without hot swappable drive bays. This an expensive NAS, but it is meant for businesses, where budget-orientated solutions aren't the top priority. However, it is easier to replace a power adapter if it has a problem.ġ x Gen3 x8 slot (x4 link) supports 10GbE network interface cards Finally, the power supply is internal, so you won't have to mess with power adapters, which take up additional space. While not of high quality, these make for a nice feature in business environments. Although it doesn't have a 10G port, you have the option of installing the corresponding network card that said, included out-of-the-box 10G capability would have been ideal. It can also take two NVMe drives for cache acceleration.

With six bays and the option to connect up to two optional DX517 expansion units, the potential storage capacity on offer with the DS1621+ is huge. The only downside is that it doesn't have an embedded GPU, which means it lacks hardware video encoding and decoding capabilities. At 16 W, its TDP is extremely low, so no active cooling is required, which makes it ideal for a NAS.

In total, it has four cores and eight threads. This is quite a strong CPU for a NAS server. The DS1621+ uses a quad-core AMD Ryzen V1500B CPU based on the ZEN Microarchitecture, clocked at 2.2 GHz. These products are meant to operate around the clock, so checking on how they behave after many hours of continuous use and under high loads before you come to any conclusions is immensely important. This is why I cannot deliver a lot of NAS reviews. Every NAS evaluation takes over a month because I run extended tests to check on not only performance, but reliability and how it operates under various conditions. Synology released the DS1621+, its first Ryzen-based NAS, a while ago, and after exhaustive testing, I have all the results in hand to finally finish this review.

Synology hot swap drive