Synology Diskstation DS1515+ is a high-end NAS with most of the features Synology can give you and designed for advanced home users or small businesses. DS1515+ is running DSM that is an OS with lots of extra features beyond the standard NAS. What is even better is if you don’t want to use all the extra features, you don’t need to install and use them.

Installation

Synology Diskstations is easy to install and setup. With DS1515+ it’s even easier since you don’t need extra tools if you use 3,5″ hard drives. The hard drive bay can be opened with a supplied key and pulled out. The hard disks are fastened with panels if you use 3,5″. If you use 2,5″ hard disks you need to use screws. Push the tray back and use the key to lock it. Then you connect the cables and start it up. You can read more about the installation and setup of diskstation in another post I wrote.

Big storage space with good backup features

With DS1515+ and fully mounted hard disks, you will not run out of storage space soon. With 5 hard disks with 8 TB, you have total storage of 40TB. If this is not enough you can buy two expansion units Synology DX513  and mount another 10 hard disks and get 120TB total storage. Most users don’t need so much space and my advice to always use RAID for safety. The backup solutions on DX1515+ are great as most other Synology diskstation. Some applications are the Hyper backup that is mostly for backup to f.eks amazon (and some other services) or other diskstation. I’m using cloud backup to backup files on my computer to the diskstation. I can also use cloud drive and sync files between multiple diskstation and computers with access from even smartphones and tablets.

Minimize Downtime

DS1515+ is made to minimize downtime. DSM is a robust and stable OS and DS1515+ got four ethernet ports that support failover and Link Aggregation, with failover network failure will be minimized. If connected to multiple networks it will switch default routing if one of the networks fail and avoid downtime. With Link Aggregation the transfer rate will be higher than with only one ethernet port. Hard disks are hot-swappable and multiple RAID choices will minimize the chance of data loss and downtime for hard disk replacement. If a fan failure occurs the Diskstation has a built-in redundancy mechanism for continuous operation until the replacement fan is installed.

Features and Specifications

• Intel Atom C2538 64-bit Quad Core 2,4 GHz CPU and hardware encryption engine (AES-NI).
• Two memory slots with pre-installed 2 GB DDR3, expandable up to 6 GB (2 GB+ 4 GB).
• 5 drive bays with space for 8 TB hard drives, total storage space 40 TB.
• Hot-swappable drives.
• Scale up to 15 drives with two Synology DX513 and total storage space 120 TB (8TB x 15).
• High Availability and SSD Read/Write Cache Support
• Four USB 3.0 and 2 eSATA.
• Four Gigabit LAN Ports with Failover and Link Aggregation Support
• VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Hyper-V Certified
• Running on Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM)

Customer Reviews and Scores

I found 99 customer reviews at the time of writing and they awarded Synology Diskstation DS1515+ 4.9 stars out of a possible 5 on average.

The customer reviews on Amazon are very positive overall, but I see some complaints on amazon.com and on Synology forums about the lack of customer support. This may be true, but I find the DSM easy to use and much information is on the internet. You also have the Synology forums to ask other users for advice. Some of the complaints are also exaggerated since it’s about third-party applications. Another complaint I see is the lack of noise insulation. With five hard disks, it can be some noise so I recommend Western Digital Red that is a quieter hard disk. I see only a few complaints about it so I think the complaining customer’s mounted the high-performance hard disk that can be a bit noisy.

Most of the reviews are about the easy installation and the great applications DS1515+ have. As one customer wrote:

Wow. all i can say is that this is the home server dream.
I previously used an old PC to manage downloads, store, and then serve media via Plex. It was a gaming PC that was replaced. It did wonderfully. but holy hell. i can now use that computer for something else. this disk station is AWESOME!
i set it up to sync with everything i own. i can DL something on any device from the internet and it goes to the disk station automatically. and then is served to my Plex automatically. for real, any picture i take is backed up, any movie or whatever, into Synology Cloud app, which is super easy to set up. it works as easily as google drive, dropbox or whatever, except its stored on my local internet connected server instead! Torrent RSS’s are all automatically downloaded by the synology disk station and served by PLEX! no PC required to manage and serve them. The added benefit is that now everything has at LEAST a 1 disk fail safe. get some Red 6TB’s and your set. My unlimited internet is crying out in pain now.

That makes it very easy for me to recommend Synology Diskstation DS1515+.

For small companies

For small companies, DS1515+ is great for its big storage space with hot swap on each hard disks. There will be no downtime if hard disk failure with the use of RAID. With encryption hardware, you can encrypt all shared folders without loss of performance and can be used in sensitive environments as HIPAA.

With more than one Synology NAS, CMS can manage and monitor all of them from a one NAS. Through a simple interface, you can have a clear overview of all resource consumption and logs.

 Conclusion

Synology Diskstation DS1515+ is designed for advanced home users and small companies. It’s easy to use with a huge variety of software and you can set it up to be almost as you like. Almost all of the real buyers of this product is very pleased with their purchase and is recommending this NAS to others.