Synology DS415play review

Mammoth storage

The “play” in the name should indicate that this is a NAS device with multimedia intentions, but it doesn’t mean this isn’t a serious bit of kit. For a start, it’s got four hard drive bays, which will seem overkill to the casual digital movie and music collector. Those people might want to take a look at the two-bay DS214play, but there are good reasons to go big from the outset.

Those four bays give you a current maximum storage capacity of a truly cavernous 24TB, if you fill them with 6TB drives (I’ve been using and been completely satisfied with Western Digital Red HDDs). More overkill? Well how about just putting in 2TB to start with, then adding another 2TB when that’s full, and so on until you’ve filled all four bays? That’s a much simpler and more cost-effective than replacing drives because you’ve run out of slots.

And Synology has some useful options for those who use multiple drives. It’s clever enough to be able to manage drives of different sized, for example, which is a rarity in the world of NAS. Your drives can be configured in clever RAID arrays, too, which means some storage is sacrificed so that all of the data on the NAS device is backed up internally – if one drive fails you haven’t lost anything.

Next-level media serving

So what are you going to do with all that storage? You’re going to fill it with music, videos and photos, I’ll wager, and when it comes to serving up that stored media the DS415play is something of a whizz.

For video there’s a built-in app called Video Station, which does a rather excellent job of sorting your media files and automatically downloading all of the metadata you might conceivably need. Download the partner DS Video app on your iOS, Android or Windows Phone device and you’ve got a really, really effective media streaming solution. DS Video is available on Roku streamers and Samsung TVs, too. Of course there are standard DLNA methods of streaming, and Plex fans will be pleased to see that’s supported, too, but Synology’s own streaming solution is the most simple, effective and elegant if you ask me.

DS Video even works when away from home. You need a solid internet connection, but I’ve watched episodes of Bob’s Burgers that are stored on my DS415play in London from a hotel room in San Diego. And yes, that did make me very happy.

Pretty much all of Synology’s DiskStation devices support this sort of video streaming, but what makes the DS415play special is that it supports real-time transcoding, so it can serve videos to devices even if they lack support for the specific video format. That can be very handy. It’s got the power to serve different videos to different devices simultaneously, too.

Compared to videos, music and photos are easy, and those are supported with their own Photo Station and Audio Station, as well as partner apps for your portables.