Bladewatch.com

PC Pro

Verdict: A well built rack mount NAS appliances with above average performance and plenty of features suited to small businesses

With its latest RS408 NAS appliance, Synology steps in line with the competition by delivering a rack mount version of its DiskStation products. The new RackStation is aimed at small businesses and offers hot-swap RAID-5 and dual Gigabit ports whilst the RP version also has dual redundant power supplies.

Synology supplied the review unit with a triplet of 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda SATA hard disks as proof it can support them. However, you can start small and grow with demand as drives can be replaced individually with larger models and the RAID controller will rebuild the array. Build quality is up with Netgear’s rack mount ReadyNAS and certainly superior to Buffalo’s TeraStation Pro II Rackmount which still doesn’t support hot-swap and uses a fatter 2U chassis.

An 800MHz processor is in the driving seat and this is partnered by a useable 512MB of DDR2 memory. The two USB ports at the rear can be used for connecting external storage devices or sharing printers over the network. The Linux OS needs to be loaded on the drives and this is handled neatly by the Assistant utility which prepares the hard disks and installs the kernel from the CD-ROM. The appliance’s web interface is a cut above the rest as Synology’s Ajax-based Disk Station Manager 2.0 interface is very slick.

An interesting review of this NAS appliance, it’s always great to see what other people think of the products. The more options there are in the NAS appliance, the more competition and innovation of the platform which has to be a good thing for the end user and the market for NAS type applications.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.