First look: Synology Diskstation DS508

 

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Posted on 28 Apr 2008 at 10:03

Synology's brand new DS508 may be the most expensive NAS device we've reviewed at £660 inc VAT from www.novatech.co.uk, but it's also the best. It's smaller than you might imagine, being only a little larger than the five 3 1/2in SATA disks that it houses. The case itself looks businesslike with its plain black finish.

Unlike previous Synology products we've reviewed, the DS508 has quick-release drive bays, which makes it a lot easier and quicker to install disks. They're hot-swappable, too, which means you can add disks for extra capacity, or remove and replaceme failed disks. Naturally, this only works if you've configured the disks in a RAID 5.

The DS508 is the most powerful Diskstation in Synology's range. It has an 800MHz processor and 512MB of RAM, which undoubtedly helps when managing the maximum of ten IP cameras (see below). Cooling everything are two 60mm fans; they're not too noisy, but this isn't the quietest NAS we've reviewed.

Around the back you'll find two USB ports for external disks, a UPS or a single printer, plus there's an eSATA port for connecting the latest external hard disks. Conveniently, the power supply is built in, so there's no unsightly black brick to find a home for. You'll also find not one but two gigabit Ethernet ports for access from two subnets simultaneously or the same subnet with two different IP addresses. In a future firmware update, Synology has also promised failover (where both ports are connected to the same network in case one port should fail) and teaming (where both network ports are used together to increase the available bandwidth).

One of the main criticisms we've levelled at NAS products in the past is poor file transfer speeds, but the DS508 is by far the fastest we've seen. Most people will configure the DS508 using all five disks in a RAID 5 since this provides extra performance of striping as well as the security of each disk holding parity information. You can, of course, create multiple RAID 0 or RAID 1 volumes, if you prefer. There's also the option to use each disk individually, with no RAID.

With all five disks in a RAID 0, the DS508 wrote large files at 40.4MB/s and read them at an astonishing 53MB/sec. These speeds became 34.7MB/s and 50.1MB/sec respectively when using RAID 5. Small-file transfers were slow, though, at around 1MB/s for writes and under 3MB/s for reads in both configurations. Bear in mind that our 100MB of small test files is mainly made up of documents which are just a few kilobytes, so you can expect faster speeds when copying larger files like photos or MP3s.

DISKSTATION MANAGER 2.0

Managing the DS508 is easy thanks to the new AJAX-based interface, which is now available to download for all Synology Diskstations. It has more features than we've ever seen on a NAS device and supports everything that business users need, including Windows ADS, Samba, FTP and AFP support, which makes it easy to share files between PCs and Macs. You can create up to 2,048 individual user accounts, 256 groups and have up to 128 concurrent connections. It's easy to set storage limits for users and give read or write permissions to shared folders.

There's much more, too, including secure FTP, a web server with PHP and MySQL, HTTP file access and both UPnP and iTunes media servers. A particularly useful new feature is the ability to schedule on and off times, which should save you money.

The brand new Surveillance Station is also noteworthy as it's a respectable application in its own right. It lets the DS508 act as a network video recorder for up to ten IP cameras, and you can find a full list of supported cameras on Synology's website. Each camera has to be manually configured, but you have full control over resolution (up to 640 x 480) and quality.