Synology Announces DiskStation DS416play – 4-Bay NAS For Home Media

If your storage requirements for the home stretch beyond that of a 2-bay NAS, and you need hardware transcoding for your mobile devices, Synology has a new NAS for you. The 4-bay DiskStation DS416play is a feature rich, high-capacity NAS for the demanding home.

Like many of the other NAS units that Synology produces, the DS416play comes with equal parts home convenience and business grade features. At its heart is an Intel Celeron dual core N3060, with a clock speed of 1.6GHz and 2.48GHz turbo. This is a fair upgrade over the previous DS415play (reviewed) that featured an Atom CPU. These x86 processors give the NAS access to the greatest variety of plugins available on Synology’s NAS units, meaning that media library managers like Plex can be installed on the system. This NAS only comes with 1GB of RAM, but this is more than sufficient for the vast majority of home users.

What really helps with the DS416play is the inclusion of dual Gigabit Ethernet, capable of delivering up to 225MB/s of throughput over the network when link aggregation is enabled. This means multiple PCs on the network can access or stream from the NAS with ease, and doesn’t require a specialized network switch to achieve. If security is a concern, the NAS can perform real-time AES-NI encryption on writes at 142MB/s. Should one of the Ethernet ports fail, the other will continue to function. RAID 5 does slow things down somewhat, but this is expected.

Hardware transcoders allow the NAS to encode videos to a lower resolution format or different codec if a mobile device or tablet does not support the encoded media you store on the NAS. This even includes 4K content, as long as it’s in the H.264 format. In our previous reviews (such as with the DS216+), we’ve seen this hardware acceleration work very well, with the CPU barely using 25% of the CPU when transcoding 4K video to 1080p. The usual assortment of media servers are available, including DLNA for consoles to pick up on, or even smart TVs. If you are just streaming normal 1080p content, then up to three devices can be supported with transcoding (including Apple TV).

As with all new Synology NAS units that support DSM 6.0 and have an x86 processor, this NAS can support Btrfs, the new file system format that replaces EXT4. Btrfs adds a number of features to a backup storage solution that can be invaluable, such as checksums on read to make sure the data is accurate, and snapshots, which allow for regular (down to the minute) backups of critical files and folders that allow you to rollback to a previous version without incident. These snapshots can then be replicated to another NAS or cloud storage service at the end of the day. Because these are just snapshots and not full backups, only the changes are saved, not full backups, saving huge amounts of disk space.

Like all Synology NAS units, the DS416play supports a wide range of services such as locally hosted Web servers, FTP, GIT or SVN servers, even email. You can even setup your own cloud storage, so you can access your files from anywhere with an Internet connection (as long as your home or business ISP has the bandwidth).

You should be able to purchase the DS416play soon from a number of retailers. Just check back in a couple of days if it’s not available just yet.