Synology DS109 NAS Review

Disk space is becoming cheaper with each passing day and the forms in which it comes are ever so diverse. And that's quite understandable - space is never enough and filling your case with hard drive is not exactly the perfect solution, after all quite often we need to be able to access our data from any computer at hand. But what's ot there besides external hard drive enclosures? Well, there are the Network Attached Storage devices - in essence they are small devices that house a hard drive and allow you to access it through your local network. Today we're reviewing DS109 – a single slot NAS, by the (unfortunately, not so popular in Bulgaria) Synology.

Synology are Taiwan based manufacturer, established in 2000 and specializing in making NAS devices. They are currently very involved at establishing themselves in Bulgaria (and grabbing some market share, naturally), and indeed we do cheer on their behalf and hope to be able find more of their products on our market in the near future. The particular model we've been supplied with for testing is DS109 – NAS device intended for home users, that fits one SATA disk and provides large array of additional functionality. Its price is set at $229 (hard drive not included).

Here is a short list of DS109 specifications:

DS109 specifications

CPU	1.2GHz, 16bit@DDR800
Memory	128MB
Hard drive	3.5" SATA(II) X1
Maximal supported capacity	2TB
Conectivity	USB 2.0 port X3, eSATA port X1
Dimentions	160mm x 218mm x 63mm
Weight	0.81kg
LAN	Gigabit X1
Fan	X1(50mmX50mm)
Noise	25dB(A)

For the full specifications list you should look at: DS109 Specications.

DS109 features

• Easy to share and backup data
• Office applications
• Integrated third party applications
• Environmentally friendly

The full list of DS109 features is rather voluminous, bur if you wish to review it - this is the place: DS109 features. By the time we wrote this article a new version of the Synology Disk Station Manager 2.2 was released, we however did our tests with the older one.