Today Synology Inc. introduced three new RackStation units. These units are aimed at backup, virtualization storage, and remote work solutions. In a slightly unusual move for the company, they have also released the HAT5300 series of enterprise hard drives or Synology HDDs. These high-capacity SATA drives are specifically designed for Synology deployments.
Today Synology Inc. introduced three new RackStation units. These units are aimed at backup, virtualization storage, and remote work solutions. In a slightly unusual move for the company, they have also released the HAT5300 series of enterprise hard drives or Synology HDDs. These high-capacity SATA drives are specifically designed for Synology deployments.
Let’s start with familiar territory, on the RackStation front, the company is releasing 2U 12-bay RS3621RPxs and RS3621xs+, and the 3U 16-bay RS4021xs+. The new NAS devices are aimed at SMB that need high-performance storage for general purposes. As far as performance improvement goes, the RS3621RPxs delivers 68% higher, the RS3621xs+ delivers 50% higher, and the RS4021xs+ delivers 21% higher random read IOPS than their respective predecessors. The new RackStations come with two PCIe Gen3 8x slots that allow for the addition of 10GbE NICs or NVMe SSD cache.
Synology RS3621RPxs Key Specs
| CPU | Intel Xeon D-1531 6-core (12-thread) 2.2 GHz, Turbo Boost up to 2.7 GHz |
| Hardware encryption engine | Yes (AES-NI) |
| Memory | 8GB DDR4 ECC UDIMM (expandable up to 64GB) |
| Compatible drive types | 12 x 3.5″ or 2.5″ SATA HDD/SSD |
| Hot swappable drive | Yes |
| External ports | 2 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports 2 x Expansion ports (Infiniband) |
| Form factor | 2U |
| Size (HxWxD) | 88 x 482 x 724 mm |
| Weight | 14.5kg |
| LAN ports | 4 x 1GbE RJ-45 |
| Wake on LAN/WAN | Yes |
| PCIe 3.0 slots | 2 x 8-lane x8 slots |
Synology RS3621xs+ Key Specifications
| CPU | Intel Xeon D-1541 8-core (16-thread) 2.1 GHz, Turbo Boost up to 2.7 GHz |
| Hardware encryption engine | Yes (AES-NI) |
| Memory | 8GB DDR4 ECC UDIMM (expandable up to 64GB) |
| Compatible drive types | 12 x 3.5″ or 2.5″ SATA HDD/SSD |
| Hot swappable drive | Yes |
| External ports | 2 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports 2 x Expansion ports (Infiniband) |
| Form factor | 2U |
| Size (HxWxD) | 88 x 482 x 724 mm |
| Weight | 14.5kg |
| LAN ports | 4 x 1GbE RJ-45 2 x 10GbE RJ-45 |
| Wake on LAN/WAN | Yes |
| PCIe 3.0 slots | 2 x 8-lane x8 slots |
Synology RS4021xs+ Key Specifications
| CPU | Intel Xeon D-1541 8-core (16-thread) 2.1 GHz, Turbo Boost up to 2.7 GHz |
| Hardware encryption engine | Yes (AES-NI) |
| Memory | 16GB DDR4 ECC UDIMM (expandable up to 64GB) |
| Compatible drive types | 16 x 3.5″ or 2.5″ SATA HDD/SSD |
| Hot swappable drive | Yes |
| External ports | 2 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports 2 x Expansion ports (Infiniband) |
| Form factor | 3U |
| Size (HxWxD) | 132.3 x 482 x 656.5 mm |
| Weight | 17.4kg |
| LAN ports | 4 x 1GbE RJ-45 2 x 10GbE RJ-45 |
| Wake on LAN/WAN | Yes |
| PCIe 3.0 slots | 2 x 8-lane x8 slots |
Synology HDD?
On to the weirder thing. Synology is releasing its own HDD in the form of the HAT5300 series. The drives come in capacities of 8TB, 12TB, and 16TB with a SATA interface. They are said to be optimized for Synology deployments through extensive validation testing to ensure seamless interaction with Synology systems and DiskStation Manager. The drives can deliver up to 274MB/s and come with automated firmware updates through DSM. The HAT5300 also has an endurance of 2.5 million hours MTBF, workload support of 550 TB per year, and persistent write cache technology.
Synology HAT5300 Specifications
| Model | HAT5300-16T | HAT5300-12T | HAT5300-8T |
| Interface/Form-Factor | SATA 3.5” / LFF | ||
| Capacity | 16TB | 12TB | 8TB |
| Class | Enterprise | ||
| Cache Buffer | 512MiB | 256MiB | |
| Reliability | |||
| Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) | 2,500,000 hours | ||
| Power Consumption | |||
| Active idle (Typ.) | 4.00 W | 4.25 W | 6.38 W |
| Operating (Typ.) | 7.63 W | 7.83 W | 9.10 W |
| Performance | |||
| Rotation Speed | 7,200 rpm | ||
| Max. Sustained Transfer Rate | 262MiB/s (274.7MB/s) | 242MiB/s (260MB/s) | 230MiB/s (241.2MB/s) |
| Service & Maintenance | |||
| Firmware Upgrade via DSM | Yes | ||
| Warranty | 5 years | ||
I say it is a bit unusual for Synology to get into the HDD business as the market is dominated by a few very large vendors. On the other hand, they did release their own SSDs last year that did fairly well in our testing. These HDDs appear to be rebranding from Toshiba. So they aren’t starting from scratch nor competing with the big guys.
Another note that we saw about SSD caching on the new RackStations was this: “Only Synology SAT5200 2.5″ or Synology SNV3500 series SSDs (sold separately) can be used to create SSD caches.” If the company intends to implement this across its entire portfolio that could be an issue unless they are selling them for less, which they probably won’t. It would make it harder for us to recommend a product that has such limited hardware.
Availability and Pricing
RackStation RS3621RPxs ($3399.99), RS3621xs+ ($4399.99), RS4021xs+($5399.99), and 8 and 12 TB HAT5300 series drives ($239.99/$349.99) are available starting today from Synology resellers globally.
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