Synology Disk Station 2-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage DS209 (White) Review

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(More customer reviews)The Synology DS209 is a good alternative for a two drive Network Attached Storage (NAS).There are other choices for a dual drive NAS with decent performance but for me the combination of performance, features, and price stands out.

The Synology DS209 is housed in a sturdy white plastic medium sized box just large enough to hold two 3.5" drives and the system board.It is powered by a Marvell CPU clocked at 1.2 GHz and 256 MB of main memory.This compares to the "upscale" DS209+II Ultra High Perf NAS with a Freescale floating point CPU clocked at 1.06 GHz CPU and 512 MB of main memory, and to the "economy" DS209j Economic 2-Bay NAS with a 266 MHz CPU and 64 MB main memory.

According to Synology, performance for Windows XP transfers are 11.46 / 39.09 / 48.31 MB/sec (upload) and 27.75 / 49.49 / 52.53 MB/sec (download) for the DS209j / DS209 / DS209+II.In my quick informal testing copying files to and from a Vista laptop over a gigabit LAN the DS209transferred files anywhere from 30 MB/sec to 43.5 MB / sec, depending on the file size.

All recent Synology NASes including the DS209 run the same application software, Synology Disk Station Manager 2.1.Some highlights of DSM 2.1 include:

- Support for file sharing with Windows / Mac / UNIX, with definable user accounts and groups.
- Web based file management (File Station 2).
- Support for FTP, Telnet/SSH, BitTorrent / eMule download, etc.
- Support for Basic, JBOD, RAID 0, and RAID 1.
- Support for attached USB drives, printing to attached USB printer.
- Support for recording/playback of IP video (surveillance) cameras attached to the network.
- Servers for iTunes, uPnP, photo sharing, e-mail, etc.
See attached screen shots for a few views of DSM 2.1.

I'm running with two WD Green 750 GB drives in Basic mode, with one disk as "operational" and the second as a backup, using File Station 2 to sync the two drives.To date I have not experienced any problems with DSM 2.1, but there are so many features available to the Synology NAS products that I can't do justice here to the quality or issues with all of them.Rather, I'll point to the user forums at the Synology website and to posts in the Synology forum at SmallNetBuilder for information / concerns about the specific applications you are interested in.I'll also point out SmallNetBuilder as a great place to get comparison performance data on many NAS units; the DS209 is not listed in the site's NAS charts, but it should perform the same as or a bit better than the single drive DS109 which has the same CPU but only 128 MB main memory.

The DS209 can be compared to the DS209+II mentioned above, as well as the QNAP TS-219P NAS Superior Performance All-in-One Server with iSCSI for SOHO and Home Users and QNAP TS-239 Pro Turbo NAS Superior Performance All-in-One Server with iSCSI for Business.There are also cheaper alternatives such as the DS209j mentioned above, the D-Link DNS321 2-Bay NAS, and the Buffalo Technology LS-WS1.0TGL/R1 LinkStation Mini 1TB Compact Shared NAS, but you will be giving up significant performance to save money as these less expensive NASes tend to have slow CPUs and less memory.IMHO the DS209 hits a sweet spot on the performance / price curve.

In summary, the Synology DS209 offers a good combination of performance and features.And while it is not the least expensive option for a dual drive NAS, it offers value for those who need more performance than an entry level box.

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Product Description:
Synology Disk Station DS209 is designed to provide users with a flexible solution to share files and increase productivity. Packed with the Synology Disk Station Manager 2.1, it delivers ease of use and variety of features. Furthermore, the optional Synology 2.5" Disk Holder provides an easy way for users to deploy 2.5" hard drives on the DS209, bringing the library quietness, power saving, and higher reliability for the DS209.Synology Disk Station is designed for data storage and sharing among Windows, Mac, and Linux. Seamless file sharing across different operation systems is an effortless process.Synology File Station 2 offers an innovative user interface with drag-n-drop and right-click capability allowing users not familiar with FTP to easily access files with a web browser.Synology Data Replicator 3 allows Windows users to back up desktop data to the Synology Disk Station. Immediate, Sync, and Scheduled Backup are fully-supported.Synology Local Backup helps to safeguard data by backing up to external hard drives via USB interface with flexible scheduling options.Synology Mail Station add-on provides a one step installation and enables Synology Disk Station to be a mail server that supports Outlook-like Web mail, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP.Synology Web Station with Virtual Host option allows users to host up to 30 websites on one single Synology Disk Station. The built-in PHP+MySQL provides the ability to create interactive websites without complicated settings.Synology Disk Station supports two USB printers simultaneously, and the Add Printer Wizard simplifies setup process with a wizard.3rd-Party Application Integration: Following "Synology NAS Server 3rd-Party Apps Integration Guide" on Synology website, users can customizetheir Synology Disk Station by installing their favorite applications.

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