So it’s the all-in-one business grade Swiss army knife of the Nas world with every possible feature imaginable. Bells and whistles aside, Synology makes claim of 112.99MB/s read and 106.91 MB/s write speeds to help justify the additional £100 price hike over the £400 DS410.

DSM 3.0's windowed configuration environment
Click for a larger image

With DSM 3.0, the write speeds come much closer to what should be expected, however, the read performance seems to suffer in some configurations. That said, use different drives and your mileage may vary. Besides benchmarks with DSM 3.0 installed on the DS411+, for consistency, figures for this model and other Synology drives previously tested running DSM 2.3 are shown too.

Benchmark Tests

CrystalDiskMark 3.0 Results

JBOD Drive Throughput

Throughput in Megabytes per Second (MB/s)
Longer bars are better

RAID 1 Drive Throughput

Throughput in Megabytes per Second (MB/s)
Longer bars are better

RAID 0 Drive Throughput

Throughput in Megabytes per Second (MB/s)
Longer bars are better

While Synology seems to be somewhat ambitious in its claims, you only have to read the company's disclaimer to see why: “The performance figures are achieved in Synology lab by using very powerful client computers with extremely optimised network settings, and could vary on different environments. A regular office desktop/notebook may not be able to achieve these high performance figures.” So now you know.