Synology DS211 2-bay - No HDD - NAS Enclosure (No HDD Installed)

This is my second NAS, my first was a Western Digital MyBookWorld II 1TB NAS which itself was impressive for the price 16MBps upload 35MBps download, but this is a whole new ballpark. I can get about 55-60MBps up and 75-80MBps down, note I'm talking megabytes not megabits. However, I cannot achieve the 100+MBps Synology claim on their website. Another factor to get the most our of this beast is a good gigabit switch that supports jumbo frames (9000 MTU) and a good NIC in your PC that also supports jumbo frames, without which I get much slower throughput in the order of about 20MBps slower. I have 2 desktops and a laptop which all give different figures. The reason I'm mentioning this is because I seen negative reviews regarding the performance of Synology products, but it's more than likely the PC or switch they are using rather than the NAS that is given them the poor results. Take my laptop for example I can only get about 45-50MBps down even though it has a gigabit NIC, but that would be due to the slow internal 2.5" 5400RPM drive. NICs vary also, one of my PC's realtek NIC supports jumbo frames but doesn't perform as well as the one with a separate Intel Pro 1000 NIC installed (both PCs are AMD Phenom X4's)!

I'm using two 1TB Hitachi Deskstar(tm) 7K1000.C hard drives, maybe the 100+MBps barrier can be broken with faster HDD's? However, I brought 3 of these one of which I put in my PC and get 108MBps according to HD Tune 2.55.

Also, the two drives in my NAS hover about 35c to 32c, the one closer to the motherboard being slightly hotter, which is cool!

The only criticism I have is the fan is noisy no matter what setting I try. It has two speed profiles one for 2.5" HDD's and the other for 3.5" HDD's. This itself means you couldn't put it in your living room as it would drive you nuts (yes it's that noticeable). I know the fan is easily replaceable for a less noisy one but I would have thought Synology would have shipped it with one knowing these will be used to stream video in the home etc.

Both my XBOX 360 and PS3 connect to this flawlessly and stream video, but so did my WD MyBookWorld NAS which was silent!

The DMS manager on the Synology is superb, it actually looks like you've remoted onto a server, you can drag windows, open multiple etc. Plus there's a host of apps you can install all via your web browser. I setup an SMTP mail server which worked perfectly, but it runs your HDD's 24/7 without the ability to power them off when idle, so it's disabled at the moment until I can figure out an alternative, which I think does exist if you use a USB Pen to store your mail instead.

Overall, I'm extremely pleased with this. Synology must have one goal, and that is to knock the socks of the competition regarding performance for the price and they certainly exceed!

Most people considering buying this device will have probably read the highly favourable reviews elsewhere, and there isn't much I can add to them, apart from saying that in my experience all the praise heaped on this and similar devices by the same maker is well-deserved.

But there may be some people who have come here after considering at other devices which seem to offer much better value for money. The price quoted here, after all, just gets you the bare housing. The drives you need have to be purchased separately, and there are other manufacturers who will sell you a ready-to-run NAS device with drives included for considerably less.

So why choose this one? There are different reasons that will appeal to different types of user, but one reason will apply for users of all types: sheer speed.

NAS (Network Attached Storage) though originally devised for large internal networks on business premises, became attractive to domestic consumers too, once home LANs became widespread. It obviously makes sense to concentrate files, especially large video or audio ones, at a single location on a home network and let all houshold members access them from desktops, laptops, smartphones or, increasingly, LAN-enabled TV sets, anywhere on the home network.

But this good idea was not well implemented by the first generation of NAS devices devised for home use by firms such as Buffalo and Western Digital. These devices may well have used high-speed serial SATA drives and boasted gigabit ethernet interfaces, but between those drives and the network interface, they placed a feeble CPU and inefficient software which throttled the rate at which data could be passed to and from the LAN. The result was that these NAS devices delivered and stored data at a mere fraction of the speed the drives inside them or the ethernet port on their casing were capable of handling, and consumers found they got much better performance from similar drives directly attached via a USB port.

Taiwanese firm Synology took a different approach. Though the outline specifications may seem the same as the devices which have given consumer-level NAS a bad name (data going from the drive(s) to the network via an Arm CPU running Samba on an embedded version of Linux) the design and implementation of the hardware, the quality of the administration software and the configuration of both Samba and Linux are superior to anything the more mainstream manufacturers provide.

Synology name their products according to a simple code. DS is Disk Station, the next digit is the total number of drives supported, the next two digits are the model year (following the now universal US hyping practice, this is invariably the year after the model was actually introduced), and finally there may be a suffix. "j" indicates a model with some degree of reduced specification, whereas "+" indicates additional power and/or features. I am reviewing the un-suffixed DS211 here, but by way of brief comparison, the DS211j has half the RAM, a slower CPU and slower data throughput, while the the DS211+, costing some £80 more and intended for business environments, has twice the RAM, data encryption in hardware (which the Amazon site wrongly says the DS211 has), an SD card slot, a connector for an external SATA drive and allows RAID disks to be hot-swapped.

With one of these devices housing your files, the only bottleneck is the speed of the LAN itself. If your LAN is set up efficiently (in particular if you have a gigabit ethernet router that handles jumbo frames properly), one of these boxes will push data on to that LAN almost as fast as the drives will deliver it. In the presence of such a LAN, most users will see little subjective difference in speed of access or storage between a DS211 and a directly-attached USB drive. For people who want to serve up large files to performance-critical applications, above all HD video players, that alone justifies the extra expense compared to a less efficient NAS box.

There are other advantages too for the "normal" user. The browser-based administration and control software (which will run on any modern browser on any platform) does more than make setting up and organising network shares very straightforward. It also allows the box to be set up as a media server (not just a file storage space) and as a download station for bit-torrent and some http-based downloading services (Megaupload and RapidShare are currently supported). This facility allows the DS211 to take full charge of downloading and storing remote resources, either in real time or following a task schedule set up in advance, without any other machines on the LAN needing to be operational. You can also configure the device to allow access to your media and other files from anywhere on the Internet, with whatever degree of control you care to specify about who can connect to what and from where. Of course, some of the cheaper devices claim to to the same thing, but few of the allow the degree and security of control built into the Synology software.

If you are a little more ambitious, you can set up the DS211 to host one or more websites, with full PHP and mysql database support, and register the Internet-facing address of the device (meaning normally that of your broadband router) with a dynamic DNS service, so that the sites remain reachable by domain name even your IP address is changed by your ISP. This requires a certain amount of knowledge about how to configure your router, and also presupposes your Internet connection has a decent upstream bandwidth, but that aside, the Synology user interface makes setting up such web hosts very simple.

For the true geek (and anyone who doesn't fit that category should skip to the end here) the DS211 has even more to offer. As I mentioned already, most NAS devices are Linux-based, and so have the ability to function as fully-fledged Linux boxes (subject of course to the limitations of the CPU and the installed memory size). However, most manufacturers make it far from simple for users to get access to the Linux innards and re-configure them. Usually some form of hacking is required, commonly involving exploiting a security weakness in the firmware to get a root prompt, but sometimes even involving opening up the case and soldering connectors for a serial port on to pads on the circuit board. The software hacks sometimes preclude subsequently installing official firmware updates, and hardware hacks, unsurprisingly, void the warranty.

But with the Synology devices there is no such obstructive nonsense. If you want to take charge of the whole box as a Linux server, you are welcome to do so. One click on a page in the administration software and you can get a root prompt from any ssh client. From that point on you can do anything with the machine that you could do with a homebrew Linux server of comparable hardware capacity (and not many years ago the DS211's spec would have been considered perfectly reasonable for hosting a general-purpose Linux server).

Synology has a refreshingly sensible policy here, clearly spelled out. If as a result of what you do with your root access, you alter the operation of their system software and break its functionality, you will get no official support from them unless and until you revert the software to the state it shipped in (which is easily enough done). However, they will continue to honour their hardware warranty, even on devices where the user has modified the software. And they go the extra mile by providing guidelines for modders that, if followed, will allow many modifications to persist across subsequent official system updates.

Beyond that, they also make available for download from their site a complete toolchain for cross-compiling software for the DS211 on any Intel-based Linux box. This means you can compile arbitrary software from source on your own Linux machine, then install the binaries on your Synology device. This has the advantage that it lets you compile whatever you like without having a compiler installed on the Synology device itself (if you are exposing your device to the Internet, absence of a compiler makes life slightly more difficult for any bad guys who hope to take over your machine for nasty purposes behind your back).

However, if you wish, you can also install optware, the Linux distribution tailored for embedded Linux devices, use the ipkg system to install a native development toolkit on the DS211, then compile and install away to your heart's content. Again, Synology offer guidelines about where to install your locally-compiled software so that it will survive official updates if it is compatible with them, and the ipkg bootstrap kits for the device ensure that the same goes for any pre-compiled packages added using the ipkg system.

Of course, anyone thinking of exposing their DS211's ssh port to the Internet will need to take some countermeasures against inbuilt security weaknesses. For example the supplied Web interface requires the administrative user to have a specific ID which can't be changed, an open invitation to brute force ssh hackers; anyone who doesn't know how to configure the ssh daemon to protect against such attacks would be better off sticking to the default web-only access.

Finally just a couple of niggles, but not enough to dent the top rating.

1) The description correctly states that the housing will take 2.5 inch as well as 3.5 inch drives. That's true; but what it doesn't say is that to mount 2.5 inch drives you need to buy special adapters from Synology first. Since we're talking only about small pieces of plastic and simple connectors, it seems a bit mean not to include them in the box for those who might need them. Read more ›

This is my first NAS, and after much research I picked this to stream music & video around the flat, as well as back up all our photos.
Its got plenty of oomph in the CPU department (1.6GHz) and memory (256MB) and has no problems streaming to Squeezebox Radio & Duet, as well as to my PC (using SqueezePlay) all at the same time and not breaking sweat. Also does a great job to the PS3.

I installed 2 * Samsung SpinPoint F2 EcoGreen Desktop Class HD154UI, which have so far been great.

After discounting other manufacturers like NetGear, Buffalo, WD, ZyXel (& more!) it came down to Synology & QNAP, as NAS's is all they both do. So on going support & expertise was a given, and reading reviews of their various NAS's you will see they are THE best, and its just a question of what suits your budget.

I must also mention the interface DSM 3.0 which is simply brilliant