Quick summary: Synology introduced the PAS3600 on 4 November 2026 as a 2U, 12-bay active-active storage system for mid-sized organisations. It supports SATA hard drives and SSDs, expands to 24 drives with one PAX212 enclosure, and is available first in Asia-Pacific; Synology has not announced public pricing or a firm date for the wider rollout.
A smaller active-active system
The PAS3600 is not a conventional single-controller desktop NASAliExpress price. Its active-active design keeps two storage controllers working as a pair, so the system can fail over without the planned interruption normally associated with moving services between separate appliances. Synology is positioning it for organisations with roughly 100 to 1,000 employees that need higher availability but do not require the company’s largest rack systems.
The base chassis provides 12 SATA bays in a 2U rack format. A single PAX212 expansion enclosure increases the total to 24 drives, and deployments can use hard drives, all-flash storage or a mixture of the two. Synology has not published a UK list price in the announcement, nor enough public detail to infer a processor, memory configuration or network interface, so those specifications should wait for regional product documentation.
Performance claims need context
Synology claims up to 607,000 read and 180,000 write 4K random NFS IOPS, plus sequential SMB throughput of 6,053MB/s read and 3,650MB/s write. These are manufacturer figures rather than independent results. Real performance will depend on the drives, network links, RAID layout, protocol, dataset and client workload, so buyers should compare the final regional configuration and test plan rather than treating the headline numbers as guaranteed.
DSM Enterprise handles failover and data protection
The appliance runs DSM Enterprise, a new branch aimed at active-active storage. Continuous Availability Manager provides hardware failover, IP Failover and MPIO integration, while the initial data-protection set includes Snapshot Replication, Hyper Backup and external key management through KMIP. Synology also lists deduplication and compression as storage-efficiency features.
Some of the announced software story is still to come. Synology says Storage Efficiency, Hybrid Share and Synology Tiering will arrive in future DSM Enterprise updates. They should therefore not be counted as launch-day capabilities when specifying the system.
Availability starts in APAC
The PAS3600 became available in Asia-Pacific on 4 November. Synology says a global rollout will follow, but it has not provided a country-by-country schedule or confirmed UK pricing. That makes this an announced and regionally shipping enterprise product, not a generally available home NASPriceAliExpress price upgrade.
For smaller installations, the practical distinction is important: the PAS3600 prioritises controller redundancy and non-disruptive service rather than the media-server and app-store use cases associated with consumer NASPriceAliExpress price hardware. Existing Synology operators should also keep DSM security maintenance separate from any hardware purchasing decision; our recent report covers the company’s warning about ransomware and outdated DSM installations. For another current NAS software story, see TerraMaster’s TOS 7 developer platform.
Sources
Synology PAS3600 launch announcement (4 November 2026).
