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Synology recently sent us their new DS109 single bay NAS server aimed at small offices and home users. Designed to support the latest hard drives, the DS109 boasts an impressive 1.2GHz processor along with the new DSM 2.1 software, and despite all this it costs just a little over $200 US... In the past we have reviewed quite a few Synology products, all of which were of course NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices. NAS is a beautiful thing, as it allows a number of users to quickly and easily share vast amounts of data, while Synology has also built in a number of other impressive features.  Already we have reviewed devices that can hold Terabytes worth of data using multiple hard drives, and while these devices are impressive, they also tend to be extremely expensive. The last affordable NAS devices that we reviewed from Synology was the single bay Disk Station 107 way back in mid-2007 and at the time it cost around $200 US. Furthermore, at the time a typical 500GB hard drive was priced at around $120 US, so it would be possible to create 500GB’s of NAS for a little over $300 US with the DS107, not bad. However while 500GB’s may not be considered a lot of storage these days, capacity was not the key weakness of the DS107. Although this was a budget NAS device, the 266MHz CPU and 64MB of memory did mean that the DS107 could only serve a limited number of users. Furthermore, despite Gigabit LAN support, we found when copying files we were often lucky to break 100-base speeds. Therefore, while the DS107 did get the job done, and when compared to competing single bay NAS devices it was very good, we knew there was room to improve. Now roughly 2 years later Synology has refreshed their entire product line up and the DS107 has been replaced with the new DS109. On paper the DS109 is considerably more powerful than the DS107, as it now features a 1.2GHz CPU and 128MB of memory. Despite the huge improvement in specifications, the pricing of the DS109 remains similar to that of the DS107, as we have found it retailing for $230 US. While the DS109 hardware has undergone a total rehaul, the Disk Station Manager software has also been subject to major upgrades. In fact it was the Synology software that won us over originally, as we found it to be the most powerful, flexible and easy to use of any NAS device. Back then we were talking about DSM 2.0, where as the new DS109 comes with DSM 2.1 installed, so we will be keen to check it out. |
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