In Use:

Setup and Administration:

Since the review of the Synology Disktation DS414j, not much has changed in their web based user interface; Disk Station Manager. We will cover a few of the screens from DSM 5.0 while using the DS415play, but I would say that 99% of it would look the same as what we just covered on this page of the DS414j review.



The screenshot shown below is from the Info Center tab of the Control Panel, where we get confirmation of the CPU and memory specifications, what version DSM the device is running, and suggestion that the Team Group branded USB 3.0 drive that happens to be connected is actually a Kingston product.



The drive configuration for this review includes four 2TB Seagate Barracuda 3.5" drives which were originally configured in Synology's Hybrid RAID (SHR) configuration.



While I initially left the DS414j in that mode for testing, I later changed it to RAID 5, and did the same for the DS415play right out of the box. I am comfortable with RAID 5, and considering all of the drives have the same capacity, I did not think SHR was what I needed. The migration process from SHR to RAID 5 was surprisingly fast. I have dealt with other devices and computers where the building and migrartion of RAID arrays can easily be measured in hours, or even closer to a day. Within just a few minutes the array was usable again, and the process of optimizing the file system continued in the background.



With the DS414j's conversion from SHR to RAID 5, the process was different. I had removed the drives from the unit and they had been reformatted, so a migration from SHR to RAID 5 was not possible. Instead a fresh installation / initialization was executed, and while I was not timing it, when I came back about a half hour later it was already done. Definitely quick, and very impressive.