Testing:
Testing will primarily take a look at read/write speeds with different types of file transfers, but we will also take a look at AC power consumption. The
Synology Diskstation DS414Slim was connected to a network where all wired devices feature Gigabit network adapters, and all cabling is CAT6 grade. The DS414Slim was connected with a six foot CAT6 cable to a D-Link branded Gigabit switch. The computer used to access the DS414Slim in this review was also connected directly to this switch with a ten foot CAT6 cable.
Testing will compare the performance of the Synology Diskstation DS414Slim with the following other network attached storage servers:
Synology Diskstation DS415+ 4-bay NAS server with 4 x 3TB drives in RAID 5
Western Digital Sentinel DX4200 16TB Windows Storage Server
Thecus N5550 4-bay NAS Server with 5x2TB drives in RAID 5
Synology Diskstation DS415play 4-bay NAS server with 4x 2TB drives in RAID 5
Synology Diskstation DS414j 4-bay NAS server with 4x 2TB drives in RAID 5
Thecus N2310 2-bay NAS server with 2x 2TB drives in RAID 1
Power Consumption:
The seven NAS servers were all plugged in to a Seasonic Power Angel monitoring device at different times in order to get real time information on the electrical current drawn while in use. The devices were tested in three conditions, where possible... 1) While the device was active - reading and writing data from two different clients in order to keep the drives spinning, 2) with the device idle - where it is fully powered up but with no active data transfers, and 3) in hibernation mode - where the disks have spun down due to inactivity to conserve electricity. The Thecus devices and the WD Sentinel DX4200 do not support hibernation, so the "N/A" shown indicates it could not complete that part of the test.
As expected, with the small size, use of lower power laptop drives, and a less powerful CPU the power, consumption is extremely low. These numbers best all of the other devices except for the DS414j which is slightly better in hibernation.
