As vendors find new ways to outdo each other with their desktop NAS devices, we’ve watched their products get bigger, faster, and heavier with more and more disk bays. Synology’s latest DS409slim shows that size isn’t everything, as this new four-drive device fits in the palm of your hand and is probably the smallest of its kind in the world.
Measuring a tiny 106 x 120 x 142 mm (W x H x D), the DS409slim takes advantage of 2.5-inch small form factor (SFF) hard drives and accommodates a quartet of them in hot-swappable Straps located at the back. The smaller drives consume less power than their 3.5-inch counterparts and in turn generate less heat, so cooling requirements can be reduced.
It is worth noting that there is a 6 cm fan under the device, which is thermally controlled. We ran tests on a pair of WD Scorpio Blue 250GB SATA drives and over a two week period we didn’t notice the fan ever turning on. In fact, the device always felt cool to the touch, so it’s fair to say that the DS409slim is virtually silent.
Although the device’s control board is tiny, it still offers decent specs and features a 1.2GHz Marvell 6281 processor combined with 128MB of DDR2 memory. Networking looks good, as you’ll find a Gigabit Ethernet port on the back and eSATA and USB 2.0 ports on top, as well as another USB 2.0 port on the front.
The power button is on the left side and it has a light blue status LED. Below that is a copy button and pressing it sends the contents of a storage device plugged into the front USB port to a pre-defined folder on the appliance.
Installation is handled smoothly by the included wizard utility, which locates the appliance on the network and offers to set up a system partition on the drives and download the Linux kernel from the CD-ROM. You then switch to browser management, where you’re greeted by the nifty Ajax-based Disk Station Manager, which we think is one of the best-designed NAS interfaces — in fact, it’s even better than that of Netgear’s ReadyNAS appliances.
Your first task is to create a RAID array, and you can choose from JBODs, Mirrors, Stripes, RAID5 with or without a hot spare, and even redundant RAID6 with two drives. For performance testing, we chose a high-speed RAID0 stripe that took only a few minutes to create.
Where you go from here is entirely up to you, and there’s a huge range of options, as the DS409slim is packed with all the features that Synology’s larger devices offer. Windows, Linux and Mac clients are on the guest list and access can be secured via a local user and group database or AD authentication. You can limit the storage space they can use by applying quotas, and for FTP services you can use encrypted transfers and set bandwidth usage limits for uploads and downloads.
The Surveillance Station looks useful as the appliance is licensed out of the box to record feeds from up to five IP cameras such as those from Axis, Panasonic and Vivotek. We tested this with an Axis 216FD and were able to view its live feed via the separate web interface, record continuously or on a schedule to the default monitor directory on the appliance and also apply motion detection.
For multimedia, you have the ubiquitous iTunes server and you can password protect your music folder and create smart playlists on the device. Add Synology’s optional remote receiver plus a pair of certified USB speakers, and Audio Station can be used to play music straight from the device. You can use Photo Station 3 to store your images on the device and publish them on the web, and the interface for this includes a blog function that can be accessed securely over HTTPS.
You can run your own website from the appliance as it comes with an Apache web server along with PHP and the latest MySQL. Backup capabilities are plentiful as the appliance can manage jobs that back up data from one local folder to another or to an external USB storage device.
Data can also be backed up to another Synology appliance or another rsync-compatible appliance over the network. For workstation backup, you get a copy of Synology’s Data Replicator 3, and after a full backup is complete, it monitors selected sources and backs up new or changed files in real time.
The DS409slim may be small, but it’s capable, with copies of a 2.52GB video clip to and from a dual 2.8GHz Xeon X5560 Broadberry CyberServe capable of respectable read and write speeds of 43MB/s and 36 MB/s delivers. FTP speeds were in the same range, with the FileZilla client reporting speeds of 48MB/s and 36MB/s, respectively.
“‘Verdict”‘
The Synology DS409slim is one of the most impressive desktop NAS appliances we’ve seen so far this year. You pay a small premium for this miniaturization, but this device is small, quiet, fairly fast, and packed to the brim with features.
(middle)””Synology Assistant will find the appliance for you and provide a quick link to the Smart Disk Station Manager interface””(/middle)
(middle)”‘Surveillance Station allows viewing and recording feeds from multiple IP cameras on the appliance”‘(/middle)
(middle)”‘Two separate utilities are provided to automate the process of downloading FTP, HTTP and BitTorrent files to the appliance.”‘(/middle)
(middle)”‘The included Data Replicator 3 provides workstation backup and real-time protection for selected files and folders”‘(/middle)
(middle)””FTP services are different and you can use the DS409slim to host your own website.””(/middle)