The new Synology DS216+ is a 2-bay NAS that incorporates a Celeron N3050 CPU. The dual 3.5″ bays and the dual core 1.6GHz Intel Celeron are aimed at providing low power consumption with a sub-8w figure when the hard drives are in hibernation. The NAS takes advantage of the Intel Cerleron N3050’s AES-NI feature to enable hardware encryption. We recently found in our Pentium N3700 benchmarks that having AES-NI even on low power chips does help encryption performance to a significant degree. We see that Synology is also targeting the unit at on-the-fly video transcoding (h.264, MPEG-2 and VC-1) for those with smaller media libraries that want to stream media to devices at home or in the office. There is a single Gigabit Ethernet connection and 1GB of RAM as well.
We find it interesting that Synology turned to Intel for this lower-end NAS unit versus ARM. The ARM chips have been making inroads in the low-end NAS market, but we are seeing Intel’s latest offerings become more competitive while still being able to run the x86 code base.
Here is the official release e-mail blurb and a link to the Synology page for this unit and their transcoding information page.
Featuring a dual-core processor with AES-NI hardware encryption engine, DS216+ is a high-performance 2-bay NAS server aimed at home and small office users － delivering encrypted data transmissions at over 113 MB/s reading, while Btrfs file system support brings advanced data protection and a high level of data integrity. DS216+ can also perform on-the-fly H.264 4K to 1080p video transcoding.
