Synology Disk Station DS408 review

Synology's Disk Station DS508 is one of the best network-attached storage (NAS) devices we've seen recently.

It currently costs £722 including VAT from www.scan.co.uk, though, which puts it beyond the reach of most home users. Synology's DS408 is cheaper but has many of the same features.

The most obvious difference is that the DS408 has room for four disks rather than the DS508's five. It supports RAID 0 and 1, like Freecom's Data Tank, but also RAID 5. A RAID 5 array needs at least three disks, and stores parity information across all the disks. If a single disk fails, your data can still be restored. The parity information takes up the space of one disk, so a RAID 5 array consisting of three 1TB disks provides 2TB of storage.

As with most Synology devices, you have to provide your own SATA hard disks. There are no lockable, removable disk trays like those in the DS508, but accessing the interior of the DS408 and fitting a disk takes only a few minutes.

Configuration is straightforward thanks to the discovery utility and sophisticated-looking web configuration interface. Setting up accounts for multiple users and assigning them different access permissions to different folders was quick and easy.

The DS408 performed well in our file-transfer tests, no matter which RAID configuration we chose. It wasn't as fast as the DS508 when configured as RAID 5, but it still fared well, copying large files at 35.2MB/s overall and transferring small files at 33.27MB/s overall. It performed similarly when configured as a RAID 1 array, managing 34.92MB/s when copying big files and transferring small files at 30.25MB/s. As our results below show, it was significantly faster when configured as RAID 0.

We had no trouble sharing a USB printer or the contents of a USB disk over our network. The Disk Station also worked well as an iTunes server and UPnP media server. The only minor problem we found was a slight pause when we skipped DVD chapters while watching a movie stored on the DS408 using a network media player.

We like the DS408's ability to download files using BitTorrent or from websites without the aid of a computer. Unlike Freecom's Data Tank, the DS408 comes with a download management program for Windows, so you don't need to access the password-protected web configuration interface to start and manage downloads.

As well as offering FTP access like other NAS devices, the DS408 provides remote access to its files through a web browser. It supports Dynamic DNS so you can access your file-sharing web page using a memorable domain name instead of a constantly changing IP address.

Synology's DS408 is an excellent NAS enclosure, but at £456 it's expensive. Thecus's similarly specified N3200 comes with three easily removable 500GB disks but costs £63 less.