A common name in home and small business shared storage, Synology has just released an updated NAS in an extremely small form factor – the DS419slim. Featuring four 2.5-inch drive bays, the new NAS can deliver 20TB of raw storage when equipped with four 5TB drives. Check out the video below.
Quick look
Priced at $329, the DS419slim offers a small, quiet form factor when discretion is important. The overall design is almost identical to the older DS416slim. Compared to a standard 4-bay NAS with 3.5-inch drives, the Slim easily stands out as a compact and lightweight alternative. Storage options are more limited in a 2.5-inch form factor, but this NAS isn’t directed that those looking for maximum size or performance.
In addition to its small size, the DS419slim is also quiet – especially if used with SSD drives. Under heavy reading or writing most NAS systems with standard 3.5-inch spinning drives can get a little noisy as data is being accessed, but with the smaller 2.5-inch drives, the 419 is much harder to hear – which is great since it can be placed pretty much anywhere. The small drive size also contributes to less power consumption.
DS419slim Video:
Quick Specs
- 120mm x 105mm x 142mm
- Dual Core 1.33 GHz Marvell Armada CPU
- 512 MB DDR3L
- HDD and SSD compatible
- 2 – 1GbE Lan ports
- 2 – USB 3.0 Port
Setup
Synology does a great job of making its systems easy to set up. Once plugged into power and the network, just open a browser and navigate to find.synology.com. The in-browser Web Assistant gets the NAS setup quick and easy. DiskStation Manager is an easy to navigate web based system for controlling the DS419slim and will be familiar to anyone who has used one of the brand’s NAS systems in the past.
Synology’s DiskStation manager has a massive amount of applications that can be installed to a Synology NAS. One that we featured recently is the Surveillance Station – an easy way to set up a home security system with a Synology NAS.
Performance
When set up in a dual Gigabit Link Aggregation environment, Synology claims the DS419slim can deliver over 220 MB/s reading and 94MB/s writing. Those writing speeds are on par with their larger systems like the DS918+, but read speed is about 50% less in comparison. When using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test app with my MacBook Pro directly connected to the NAS via an ethernet adapter, I was seeing about 95MB/s write and 108MB/s read.
Conclusion
With its small size, the DS419slim is perfect for those who want the redundancy of a 4-bay NAS without the usual large size. Its compact design lends itself to being portable and easy to use in any situation. You’ll get better performance out of a larger system, but it is hard to beat the form factor of the DS419slim.
Buy the Synology DS419slim on B&H
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