Synology DiskStation DS2422+ review: A cube of great capacity

Like good books and chocolate biscuits, you can never have too much storage capacity. Synology’s DiskStation DS2422+ aims to satisfy storage-hungry SMBs, and this mighty desktop appliance‘s 12 hot-swap storage bays make it a great choice as a high-capacity central backup vault, with plenty of room for services such as file sharing and video surveillance recording.

Stepping up as the successor to the three-year old DS2419+ (as well as the identical DS2419+II), it employs the same cuboid chassis but claims a significant performance boost. Once again, we see Synology giving Intel its marching orders as the elderly Atom C3538 CPU in the DS2419+ is replaced with a slightly younger quad-core 2.2GHz Ryzen V1500B CPU.

Base memory remains the same at 4GB of DDR4 (upgradeable to 32GB) but this is now the more reliable ECC variety. Another notable change is the Infiniband external expansion port in the DS2419+ has been replaced with a standard mini-SAS HD port, which supports one DX1222 12-bay desktop unit.

Synology DiskStation DS2422+ review: Build and hardware features

Build quality is excellent, and the DS2422+ is clothed in a very solid metal chassis that’s been designed to make light work of upgrades. For memory, you just undo two screws and slide the side panel off, while the single PCI-E expansion slot is easily accessed by removing the top panel.

The appliance provides the same quartet of Gigabit ports as all previous versions, so you’ll need the PCI-E slot if you want to upgrade to 10GbE. The appliance also lacks M.2 SSD slots but you can address this with Synology’s E10M20-T1 card, which costs £200 and provides dual M.2 NVMe SSD slots as well as a copper 10GbE port.

When it comes to upgrades, you’ll want to pay attention to Synology’s compatibility lists, as its main focus is on its first-party expansion cards. You’ll need to follow this for storage too, as apart from a solitary 4TB WD drive, the only hard disks and SSDs on the list are, unsurprisingly, Synology’s own brands.

You can still use other vendor’s storage devices, but it’s probably not worth the risk. They’ll show up in the web console as unverified, the appliance will warn you it is in danger and Synology states it will not provide technical support.

Synology DiskStation DS2422+ review: DSM 7 features

For testing, we loaded up four 8TB HAT5300 SATA hard disks which were accepted without any complaints. We used Synology’s Finder web app to discover the appliance on the lab network, where it automatically installed the latest DSM 7 software and on completion, we used the DSM Storage Manager app to create a RAID5 storage pool.

The new DSM 7 web interface is easy on the eye and it introduces a range of new features, including storage performance improvements and smarter SSD caching. The Storage Manager app has been revamped to make it more informative, access security has been tightened up with 2FA and you can now back up the system’s configuration to your Synology cloud account.

The latter comes into play with the new Active Insights dashboard which provides a wealth of system and storage performance metrics on all registered appliances. It’ll keep you posted on unusual login activity and show details of Hyper Backup jobs, but doesn’t currently include anything on Synology’s excellent Active Backup Suite of apps.

Synology’s C2 cloud storage has a bigger part to play too. Along with standard cloud backup services, the new C2 Transfer option adds encrypted file sharing while C2 Identity provides SSO (single sign-on) and strong access controls to company resources.

The Hybrid Share feature allows multiple NAS appliances to mount cloud storage for local access - although this requires a C2 Storage Advanced Plan, which costs around £60 per year for 1TB and also adds hourly backup services and deduplication. The cheaper Basic plan drops yearly costs to £51 but is limited to a maximum of 1TB of cloud storage and only offers daily backup services and file versioning.

Synology DiskStation DS2422+ review: 10GbE performance

For our high-speed tests, we installed Synology’s E10G21-F2 dual-port fibre 10GbE adapter in the appliance and cabled it to an Emulex 10GbE card in a Dell EMC PowerEdge T640 Xeon Scalable tower running Windows Server 2019. The DS2422+ delivers on its speed claims, with a mapped share returning Iometer sequential read and write speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 8.7Gbits/sec, as opposed to 9.2Gbits/sec and 4.4Gbits/sec for the DS2419+.

It was the same story for our real world tests; drag and drop copies of a 25GB file returned read and write averages of 5.2Gbits/sec and 5Gbits/sec - increases of 13.2% and 50.2%. The Ryzen CPU also scored better for encryption performance, with our 25GB file copied to an encrypted share at 2.8Gbits/sec for an 84.3% improvement over the DS2419+.

IP SAN numbers also showed marked improvements. A 500GB iSCSI target delivered sequential reads and writes of 9.1Gbits/sec and 7.7Gbits/sec, as opposed to 8Gbits/sec and 6.3Gbits/sec for the DS2419+. Ramping up the pressure with a dual 10GbE MPIO connection to the target resulted in an increase in read speeds to 17.7Gbits/sec but a small drop in writes to 7.2Gbits/sec - although these were still 41% and 24% better than the DS2419+, respectively.

DSM 7 also claims to support Fibre Channel adapters, but the DS2422+ completely ignored the ATTO Celerity 16Gbps FC card we fitted in it. On closer inspection of the DSM 7 features list, we found that only specific NAS models support FC cards and the DS2422+, alas, wasn’t one of them.

Synology DiskStation DS2422+ review: Verdict

The DiskStation DS2422+ is a well-built NAS appliance and its Ryzen CPU makes it considerably faster than the Atom-powered DS2419+. The lack of embedded 10GbE and M.2 SSD slots do count against it though, and you’ll need to pay close attention to Synology’s compatibility lists when purchasing components.

Even so, this big desktop appliance offers a lot for a very reasonable price. SMBs looking for an affordable high-capacity desktop backup vault will find the DiskStation DS2422+ a worthy contender, made all the more appealing by the new DSM 7 software.

Synology DiskStation DS2422+ specifications