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Quite simply one of the best attributes of the Synology NAS devices, other than the functionality, is the stylish looks. The DS109 is no exception, as the design has gone unchanged, and while this could be viewed as a little disappointing, the original design was impressive enough to be reused years later.   As with the original, the only disappointing aspect of the DS109 design is that it comes in just one color, being white. This was also the case with previous Disk Station models as well as the Cube Station CS407e, which again came exclusively in white. While they do look impressive in white, I am confident most users would have preferred black. The Disk Station DS109 is an attractive unit that leaves a very small footprint. Measuring just 21.8cm long, 16cm wide, and 6.3cm thick, the DS109 is roughly the same size as a 5.25” optical drive, which is impressive given what it houses. The front of the DS109 features four green lights that indicate status, LAN, HDD and eSATA activity.   There are also USB and eSATA ports for copying from external devices on the front of the DS109. Furthermore there is a copy button next to the USB port which is simply labeled “C” for copy. Then at the very bottom there is the power button which glows blue when active. This is all very similar to the DS107, with the addition of eSATA support.  The rear end of the DS109 is nothing unusual, featuring a single 60mm fan designed to extract heat generated by the hard drive from within the unit. There are two more USB ports, along with a single Gigabit LAN port, and a power input socket. All up the DS109 weighs less than a kilogram, at just 810 grams (without any hard drives installed).  Inside the DS109 there is a PCB board which makes this NAS device very unique when compared to your typical hard drive enclosures. Featured on the PCB is a 1.2GHz processor with 128MB of memory. The original DS107 came armed with a much slower 266MHz processor using just 64MB of memory, so we do expect to see a significant gain in performance here. Please note that the memory capacity cannot be upgraded, as the memory chips are fixed to the PCB and there are no DIMM slots.  The large PCB board also features a Marvell Alaska 88E1116R Gigabit LAN controller, which is a single multi-Interface transceiver. There is also the Marvell Kirkwood chipset, and the particular model featured on the DS109 is the 88F6281, which houses a “Sheeva” CPU designed to operate at 1.2GHz.   The Kirkwood 88F6281 is designed for complex applications, like digital home media servers, because of its extensive I/O integration, low power consumption, and high performance. The 88F6281 allows direct integration of wireless chipsets, USB peripherals, VoIP devices, hard disks, and other components that are required for digital home media server products. Although the Kirkwood 88F6281 is designed for digital home media servers, this purpose makes it ideal for use in network attached storage as well. The fact that the Kirkwood supports dual SATA ports makes it ideal, as does its 16-bit DDR2 memory interface. The Marvell Kirkwood certainly is an impressive chipset and it is amazing to think that such a tiny chip can house so much. |
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