Intel Celeron N3160 64-bit Quad Core 1.6 burst up to 2.24 GHz
Encryption performance at over 226.09 MB/s reading, 138.04 MB/s writing
Scale up to 7 drives with Synology DX513
Advanced snapshot technology for data protection
Introduced BTRFS file system with built-in data integrity check

The DiskStation DS716+, a new-for-2016 model, is easily one of the highest-end, most feature-filled NAS units we’ve ever tested. This two-bay black beauty is designed for small businesses and very serious home-video enthusiasts. It offers dual Gigabit LAN ports, supporting link aggregation for improved performance over two discrete network connections, as well as a failover feature that essentially affords you a backup LAN connection in case one fails. This feature is uncommon among NAS drives, though we also saw it of late on the Netgear ReadyNAS 212. The DiskStation's other big selling point is that it ships with a quad-core Intel Celeron CPU, a dedicated hardware transcoder, and 2GB of internal RAM, giving it enough horsepower to transcode 4K videos.

Indeed, this is the first NAS we’ve ever seen that actually can wrestle 4K video files to the ground, as even the older Synology NAS models generally don’t have enough horsepower to handle these beastly files. But the DiskStation DS716+ was made for just that. Also, like the Netgear ReadyNAS 212, the DS716+ includes the option to format the drives’ file system in BTRFS, which allows for snapshot recording and greater data integrity. (Synology has an overview of that here.) In addition, it allows the contents of the NAS to be encrypted, using Intel’s new AES NI instruction set, which is also a first.

Synology DiskStation DS716+ (Intro 2)
This two-bayer, by default, puts both drives you insert into what Synology refers to as "SHR" mode. That stands for "Synology Hybrid RAID," but it acts for all intents and purposes like RAID 1, as all data is mirrored to both drives. If your data is ephemeral and can-afford-to-lose, you can alternately put the drives into RAID 0 striping for a bit more access speed (and to use most of the capacity of both drives), or just use plain old JBOD if you want access to all of the capacity available from both disks.

The unit supports the latest platter hard drives up to 8TB, so you have a potential maximum of 16TB of drive capacity if you don't go the redundancy route. You can also attach an external Synology five-bay expansion unit, the Synology DX513, that can extend this NAS (and a bunch of others in the Synology line, as well) to a seven-bay device.

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