Synology RackStation RS2211+ review

Many NAS appliance vendors are now making rack mounted appliances, but some seem to have forgotten that expansion is a key business requirement. Not so with Synology as its latest RackStation RS2211+ can be linked to an RX1211 expansion shelf with 12 drive bays via a high performance Infiniband port.

The RackStation RS2211+ can be linked to an RX1211 expansion shelf with 12 drive bays via a high performance Infiniband port

The main unit has ten hot-swap drive bays so this dynamic duo allows capacity to be pushed to an impressive 66TB, although the latest 6Gbit/s SATA disks aren't yet to supported. We tested the RS2211+ and RX1211 together in this review, but for full power redundancy, Synology offers RS2211RP+ and RX1211RP combos which both have dual hot-plug power supplies.

The RS2211+ unit is a well built 2U rack chassis with the tenth drive bay located underneath a system status panel on the right. We were impressed with its internal layout as the custom motherboard has everything neatly embedded on it.

The SATA interfaces are cabled directly to the hard disk backplane and the Infiniband expansion port is hard wired at the back. The appliance has a 1.8GHz dual-core Atom processor and a spare SODIMM socket allows the standard 1GB of DDR2 memory to be increased to 3GB.

The Infiniband port sits at the rear of the RackStation RS2211+

A point worth highlighting is that the Infiniband connection represents a single point of failure. Higher-end appliances such as HP’s P2000 G3 use dual RAID controllers with redundant SAS ports for expansion shelves, although these do cost many times more than the RS2211+.

Installation follows the same path as all other Synology appliances where an Assistant utility finds the appliance on the network and loads the DSM (Disk Station Manager) software for you. Array setup comes next and for testing we loaded four 1TB WD SATA disks and created a RAID 5 array.