Synology Intros Four-Bay Transcoding NAS

Synology has announced a four-bay media-focused NAS.

The DS415play is a four-bay version of the DS214play announced last October and the second Synology NAS to support hardware video transcoding for H.264 (AVC), MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-2 and VC-1 formats.

The DS415play's hardware platform has a 1.6 GHz dual-core Intel Atom CE5335 "Evansport" CPU with integrated floating-point unit with 1 GB of DDR3 RAM. Four hot-swappable bays support 2.5" or 3.5" solid state or hard drives that can be configured in JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10 and individual volumes. Synology specs "over 110 MB/s read performance and over 100MB/s write".

Synology DS415play

It has a single Gigabit Ethernet port for LAN connection and three USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports for external storage, printer and other device connection. Unlike its two-bay predecessor, the DS415play lacks an eSATA port and SD card slot. Neither product sports the HDMI port that similarly-focused products from QNAP have.

The DS415play runs Synology's DSM 5.0 OS, which has a broad feature set including photo, audio and video servers, DLNA streaming, QuickConnect remote access, Google Drive / Dropbox sync, Apple Time Machine backup and much more.

MSRP is $539.99 and the DS415play should be hitting US stores "in the next couple of weeks".