Home Enterprise Synology Releases new RackStation Units & HDDs

Synology Releases new RackStation Units & HDDs

by Adam Armstrong
Synology Rackstations hdd

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.

Synology Rackstation hdd

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 Rackstations hdd

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.

Synology

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