Data Center

Review: The Synology DiskStation 1019+ Offers Easier-to-Use Storage

This device is powerful, extensible, and a cinch set up — a potential time- and cost-saver for K–12 schools.

Logan G. Harbaugh is a longtime technology journalist with experience reviewing a wide range of IT products.

Schools often lack a full-time computer systems administrator, and keeping up with new versions of server operating systems such as Windows Server or Linux Server requires significant training.

A network-attached storage server like the Synology DiskStation DS1019+ touts easy-to-use storage minus the ongoing maintenance and administrative costs.

The DS1019+ is also less expensive than a traditional file server. It can provide as much or more functionality, with a user-friendly interface, great extensibility and dozens of applications.

The DS1019+ frees administrators to focus on making more apps available to teachers and students rather than studying user rights, privileges, anti-virus scanning and other tasks that a standard file server requires.

Expand Storage, Boost Performance

The system includes five drive bays that each support a 16-terabyte SATA hard drive for a raw capacity of 80 terabytes.

It can also be used with SATA solid-state drives or expanded to 10 drives with an additional expansion chassis.

Standard memory is 8 gigabytes, but that can be expanded to 32GB to run additional applications or to accelerate performance, allowing one small device to handle more users and more applications without bogging down, saving the school money for extra capabilities.

There are also two Non-Volatile Memory Express slots for adding high-end SSDs to enhance performance.

Plus, the DS1019+ can easily be expanded from a simple, two-drive RAID 1 system, without disrupting service, by adding more drives to boost storage capacity and change the RAID level.

For example, a 32TB RAID 1 volume can be upgraded to an 80TB RAID 5 volume without having to reformat the disks.

The drives are hot-swappable, so it’s not necessary to take the system offline to add additional drives — which means an administrator doesn’t have to come in after hours to make upgrades.

Adding more RAM, a 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter or one or two NVMe SSDs requires powering the system down, but doesn’t require additional changes or software.

The system recognizes the new features automatically and will be faster once it’s powered back up.

Reliably Fast Response Time

In my testing, I migrated a two-drive RAID 0 volume to a two-drive RAID 1 volume, then to a three-drive RAID 5 volume, all without having to reformat.

I added a 1TB NVMe SSD and found that performance improved by as much as 40 percent, which means one device can handle more users without slowing down response times.

Bottom line: The easy setup and operation of the Synology DiskStation DS1019+, not to mention its lower cost, make this NAS server a solid choice for schools.

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Add School-Specific Functionality

Early network-attached storage systems made files available only to PCs on a network — usually, only Windows clients.

The Synology DiskStation DS1019+ does a great deal more.

Not only will it support all the clients a school might use — Mac, iOS, Linux, Android and web clients, as well as Windows — but it also offers additional capabilities through applications, many of which are free and mostly available from Synology’s app store.

Apps that a school might need include an audio/video server, web server, Mac and iOS support, Cloud file sync, Drupal, Git, email, a sophisticated backup server, photo server, surveillance storage server, VMware support, Moodle, anti-virus scanning, a number of data base servers, calendar server, wiki support, Docker support — the list goes on.

The backup and anti-virus services are especially noteworthy with the heightened threat of ransomware attacks.

Not only will the DS1019+ scan for malware, it also can back up files to prevent them from being changed or encrypted.

With that feature, a successful ransomware attack will only produce new encrypted files, while the old unencrypted ones remain.