Synology announces the DS216, an updated 2-bay NAS device

Synology continues upgrading their product line for the new year with the announcement of the DS216, an update to the popular DS214 device released a couple of years ago.

Even though many people are moving their files to the cloud, there's still a large number of individuals and organizations that want to keep their data on-premise for both security and ease of access reasons. To that end, today Synology announced the DS216, a two-disk NAS device targeted at small workgroups, offices, and home users.

The new device is powered by a dual-core Marvell Armada 385 1.3 GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM, promising speeds of over 110 MB/s in a RAID 1 configuration. In addition, the DS216 has extra hardware to offload processing off of the CPU to deliver a better user experience: The built-in Floating-Point Unit improves the overall performance of the system, while a dedicated encryption engine offloads the complicated mathematical computations so that the rest of the system can focus on throughput.

As with all Synology devices, the DS216 runs DSM which supports a wide-range of add-on applications such as dedicated BitTorrent clients, web and database services, and more. In addition, mobile applications allow customers the ability to access files from anywhere.

This appears to be an iterative improvement over the previous model, but looking at the specs, video streaming is vastly improved: For example, while the DS214 supports streaming H.264 video at only 24 frames per second at 2591x1944, the DS216 supports 60 FPS at the same resolution.