Synology's beastly 5-bay DS1520+ is a power user's dream NAS

Synology DiskStation DS1520+ (Image credit: Synology)

What you need to know

The DS1520+ is now official for $699, with the NAS offering five drive bays and four Gigabit Ethernet ports.
It is powered by the Intel Celeron J4125 chipset and has 8GB of RAM installed out of the box.
Synology's DiskStation Manager is highly extensible and lets you run Docker containers.

Synology has a lot of great NAS enclosures at all price points, and its latest offering is aimed squarely at power users. The DS1520+ is now official for $699 (opens in new tab), and it has a lot of enticing features on offer.

First up, the NAS has five drive bays that can hold a total of 80TB of storage — with each bay accommodating up to 16TB drives. The NAS is powered by a 64-bit quad-core Intel Celeron J4125 chipset — the same as the DS720+ and DS920+ — and you get two M.2 slots for SSD caching. The DS1520+ has 8GB of RAM out of the box, with two 4GB DIMM modules installed.

On the connectivity front, you get four Gigabit Ethernet ports with Link Aggregation, two USB 3.0 ports, and two eSATA ports. DiskStation Manager continues to be the best software on any NAS today, and you get the extensibility to run just about anything you want via Docker.

The DS1520+ retails for $699, but the NAS is available on Amazon right now for $649 (opens in new tab), $50 less than its retail price. So if you're looking to upgrade from an earlier model or have been waiting for a powerful 5-bay NAS, now is the time to get your hands on the DS1520+.

Synology DiskStation DS1520+

The DS1520+ has five drive bays that can hold a total of 80TB of storage. There's 8GB of RAM and an Intel Celeron J4125 chip, four Gigabit Ethernet ports, and all the great software features that Synology is known for. This is the ideal NAS for enthusiasts.

$650 at Amazon (opens in new tab)

Seagate IronWolf NAS Hard Drive

Seagate's IronWolf drives are what I rely on to power my NAS enclosures. I have a half dozen IronWolf drives totaling 40TB, and I run them 24/7 in various enclosures. These drives deliver stellar performance and run reliably for several years without any issues.

From $92 at Amazon (opens in new tab)

Harish Jonnalagadda is a Senior Editor overseeing Asia at Android Central. He leads the site's coverage of Chinese phone brands, contributing to reviews, features, and buying guides. He also writes about storage servers, audio products, and the semiconductor industry. Contact him on Twitter at @chunkynerd.