Synology Disk Station 409slim review

Synology has added even more features with Disk Station Manager 2.1. Most of the multimedia features will be of little interest to businesses, but there are lots of others that will be. A new network recycle bin addresses previous criticism of Disk Stations, and means that accidentally deleted files can be quickly recovered. The print server means you can attach a USB printer and share it on the network, while the eSATA port enables you to connect a large-capacity external drive for backing up the DS409’s content. Bear in mind, though, that NTFS-formatted disks can’t be written to.
Installable packages are still thin on the ground, but the Mail Station could save you buying a separate server for email. The web server (with PHP/mySQL support) might be useful for a company intranet, while the ability to manage up to five IP cameras means the DS409slim could even take care of your physical security measures. Surveillance Station 2 is easy to use, both for configuring motion detection and recording schedules as well as for locating events in recordings.

Many will appreciate the scheduled power on/off settings, which allow you to choose at what time the Disk Station powers on and powers off each day. You can additionally select the days this applies to, with presets for weekend and weekdays. The download manager is a useful tool, too. In addition to BitTorrent support, it can handle FTP and HTTP downloads, meaning you don’t need to leave a PC on for large, overnight transfers.

The DS409slim supports CIFS, AFP, FTP, NFS and SSH protocols. Security isn’t skimped on either, with FTP access over SSL, encrypted network backup and HTTPS support, which means you can securely access files remotely. It’s easy to create users, groups and shared folders, as well as permissions for each, plus there’s the expected Windows ADS support.

We configured four 250GB disks as a RAID 5, which took around 10 minutes in Rapid mode. Of course, performance - as with any barebones appliance - will depend on the particular disks you install. Our 5,400rpm drives managed 30.4MB/s when reading large files, and 19.2MB/s when writing. With small files, these figures dropped to 25.7MB/s and 17.3MB/s respectively. Speeds weren’t much faster when configured as a RAID 0, but were around 4MB/s slower for reading and writing in a RAID 6. These speeds are slower than we’ve seen from 3.5in disks in Synology’s DS409,

With 2.5in disks costing around twice as much as 3.5in disks for the same capacity, the DS409slim isn’t the greatest choice if value is your top priority, although the unit itself is cheaper than we were expecting. If size, noise and power consumption are the critical factors, it’s a hands-down winner.