First look: Synology Diskstation DS508

 

Gallery

Posted on 28 Apr 2008 at 10:03

Surveillance Station supports motion detection and you can set specific areas in the camera's view to monitor. It's simple to schedule either continuous or motion detection recording by highlighting blocks of time on the timeline. Then, you can go to the event viewer to watch recorded video - this is surprisingly fast to use. Of course, if you want to watch live feeds, you can easily do this on a LAN or remotely by forwarding port 9000 on your router.

Backup is well catered for. Synology bundles Data Replicator 3 for backing up files and folders on network computers to the Diskstation, but the Diskstation can back itself up onto an external hard disk or another Diskstation on the network. Backups are encrypted for security. There's even third-party support for Acronis, Symantec, EMC and LaCie backup packages.

Another handy application, although not necessarily for business, is a BitTorrent Download Station. This client allows you to redirect downloads to the DS508 rather than leaving a PC on. There's full bandwidth control and you can change the range of ports is uses.

Finally, there's Photo Station 3, which lets you host your photos and videos so they can be viewed remotely over the internet. As you'd expect, you can create user accounts with passwords to prevent anyone else from seeing your media. JPEG and BMP photos are supported, while AVI, MPEG1, MPEG4, WMV, DivX, XviD files can be streamed. Performance will depend on the upload speed of your internet connection.

For enthusiasts who want to use the DS508 at home, the UPnP server now has full Xbox 360 and PS3 support, so you can store music, photos and videos on the Diskstation and access them easily through your console.

CONCLUSION

At this price, the DS508 begins to tread on the toes of entry-level Windows 2003 servers, and don't forget that it doesn't include any hard disks. However, it does a lot more than these servers, supports five disks and has dual LAN ports. Add Synology's great customer support and thriving community, and you can be sure that the firmware will continually be upgraded and new features added in the future. The huge array of features - particularly Surveillance Station - and the superb large-file performance mean it's well worth the outlay.

NETWORK ATTACHED STORAGE 2x 10/100/1,000Mbit/s network connections, 512MB RAM, three USB ports, eSATA port, FTP server, print server, web server, HTTP file server, UPnP media server, iTunes server, network video recorder, takes up to five 1TB 3in SATA hard disks, 203x242x177mm, two-year return-to-base warranty. Power consumption 55W on
DETAILS: www.synology.com

PERFORMANCE

RAID0
Large write 40.44MB/s
Large read 53.17MB/s
Small write 1.1MB/s
Small read 2.85MB/s

RAID1
Large write 26.05MB/s
Large read 41MB/s
Small write 3.18MB/s
Small read 2.38MB/s

RAID5
Large write 34.71MB/s
Large read 50.91MB/s
Small write 1.29MB/s
Small read 2.73MB/s

Author: Jim Martin