Final thoughts and rating
Managing the DiskStation DS411+ is admittedly a pleasure, but whilst excelling in one aspect, the unit stutters in another.
Performance during our benchmarks proved to be decidedly average, and if speed is your primary concern, rival manufacturers offer quicker four-bay alternatives at around the same price.
Furthermore, if your interest rests primarily with Synology's excellent DiskStation Manager interface, the less-powerful DS410 offers similar looks and all of the same features for some £140 less.
Priced at £510, Synology's DiskStation DS411+ needed to fulfil its promise of high performance and easy manageability. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite deliver on both fronts.
The Good
Intuitive DiskStation Manager 2.3 software
Excellent selection of built-in applications
Compact and elegant design
The Bad
Competing solutions offer better performance at this price
HEXUS Rating
Synology DiskStation DS411+
HEXUS Awards
Synology DiskStation DS411+
HEXUS Where2Buy
The Synology DiskStation DS411+ can be purchased from SCAN.co.uk* at a cost of £509.93.
HEXUS Right2Reply
At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.
Synology right2reply, July 28, 2010:
The team at Synology was shocked to hear that the combination used by Hexus on this occasion for their NAS Server comparison showed results which did not reflect the performance scores generated in Synology test laboratories. The team at Synology immediately set to work to investigate why these scores have come through differently.
At the same time, Synology have sent a test system to Hexus for them to use on future NAS performance testing.
Once there's an update on the performance, we will post it in this article.
In addition to the above right2reply, Synology has provided its own in-house benchmark results. The numbers have been published verbatim on the following page.
