I’ve heard it said before that “Synology is NAS”. Their entire product suite consists of NAS solutions for every storage situation from home offices through small business to medium enterprise. Synology focus on a complete NAS experience, not just shared storage but applications that rival server OSs.
Just over a year ago, MacTalk reviewed the Synology DS410j and summed up its positives as easy to use, with a great interface, versatile applications, a small footprint and a good price. The drawbacks were a big and bulky power supply and transfer speeds that could be improved. Today we’re looking at the new DS411 slim, a unique new smaller NAS that uses 2.5” drives to reduce power consumption and noise, that also brings the latest version of the Synology’s Disk Station Manager operating system and we’ll see what’s changed in the last year of Synology.
What you get in the box
- The Synology DS411slim unit itself
- A base to improve ventilation
- Power Adapter & Cord
- Disk Drives Labels (1-4 stickers ensures the correct drive order)
- 2m Cat6 LAN Cable
- 16 screws to attach 2.5” drives to trays
- Installation Guide
- Installation DVD including further documentation and software.
The device
The first thing you will notice is that the DS411slim is that it’s extremely small for a 4-bay NAS, especially compared to something like a Drobo or ReadyNAS. It’s a good looking unit, with LEDs for Status, LAN and each HDD on the front, along with a USB socket for connecting external drives. The only buttons are on the side for Power and one-touch USB Copy. On the back is another USB 2.0, Gigabit LAN and eSATA. It’s actually a 1.6GHz machine inside with 256MB ram and most important runs silently. This is something that can easily live on your desk without making itself known.
While I’ll dig into the more advanced stuff soon, at its heart the DS411slim is a very powerful NAS. While you can configure your up to 4 drives in your choice of RAID configuration, many users will go straight for Synology Hybrid RAID, allowing you to combine different sized drives, expand the volume easily by adding new drives and up to 2 disk redundancy. Creating and initialising the first volume was simple with included wizard. Across a Gigabit network transferring a 3.8GB .dmg file from a Mac mini to the DiskStation with 1 Western Digital Scorpio Blue delivered write speeds topping 30MB/s (read speed copying the file back were similar). You can easily add external storage through the USB & eSATA ports, perfect for the one-touch Copy backup.
The “OS”
Synology sets itself apart from the rest with the software that powers every one of their boxes from high end rack mounted products to the Home and Small Office range that the DS411slim slips into. DiskStation Manager, recently updated to version 3.1, is desktop class with a multitasking UI; customise the desktop background, create shortcuts on the desktop, pin apps to the taskbar and manage windows, all from within your browser.
The responsiveness, intuitive design and reliability of the OS were impressive all through my testing. A lot of the features required enabling in the Control Panel before they are available as apps on the deskop, but the only instance that required a reset of the DiskStation is updating the DSM firmware itself. While you’ll find a lot of advanced features from running a web, mail or FTP server through DDSN and SNMP, novice users will still feel comfortable starting with the basics and working their way up.
Some of the apps I found myself enjoying most often were Download Station, which includes built-in search and support for almost every protocol on the web (and as of 3.1 supports RSS feeds), Audio Station, a competent music player, and the again surprisingly complete File Browser that even integrates Google Docs support for file viewing. The fantastic part of the web interface is that with a bit of port forwarding, you’ll have access to almost all the features NAS from anywhere on the net (in fact, a recent beta update also added VPN Centre to allow your DiskStation to run a PPTP or OpenVPN server).
iOS Support
The web interface is workable on the iPad, but sometimes frustratingly without the ability to resize or move windows. Although the DSM interface uses a lot of lovely AJAX, the Audio Station player oddly uses Flash. There is a “Mobile Interface” designed for the iPhone but it is sadly limited to only a few apps. The saviour is that Synology have jumped on the App Store bandwagon and released a full suite of apps including 4 universal apps for native iPad and iPhone access to your files and media through DS audio, DS file, DS photo+ and DS cam (plus an iPhone only DS finder to monitor the staus of your DiskStation). These are even supplemented a pair of apps by 3rd parties to access Download Station remotely. While “SynoDS” did the job of being able to add and manage downloads, it isn’t as polished as the apps from Synology. The frequency of the updates to the iOS apps from Synology and their overall commitment to the platform makes me confident an official “DS download” isn’t too far away.
Media, AirPlay & iTunes
Until the release of iTunes 9 support for DAAP was the ultimate in sharing your music library, but sadly this is the extent of the iTunes support in DSM. While the DS audio iOS app supports AirPlay there is no support for AirPlay or iTunes Home Sharing in DSM, meaning you can’t stream audio from a DiskStation to a new Apple TV without using an iPad or iPhone in between. Synology recently discussed these limitations in a blog post - sadly Home Sharing may not be possible due to the authentication used. The good news is that AirPlay support is available as part of current beta program (only release on May 21) and works like a treat. While the DS411slim does also support USB speakers and has an optional remote, I live in an Apple ecosystem (as I’m sure many of you do) so AirPlay support is definitely appreciated (hopefully they can work out a way to add Home Sharing support soon). The DS411slim is also a UPnP Media Server, and while this isn’t a technology that Apple has adopted, it does make it easy to stream video, audio and photos from your DiskStation to most modern TVs or your PS3/Xbox 360.
Conclusion
The Synology DSS411slim takes an amazingly powerful line of NAS devices to a new compact place. I was continually blown away by the slick and intuitive native of the entire interface and the support for the iOS platform is a great bonus. Synology’s constant updates is exciting and reassuring. The use of 2.5” drives certainly makes for a small and quiet package, but does limit the availability of cheap high capacity drives when compared to 3.5” boxes. If you’re looking for a flexible NAS with features rivaling many server OSs and your priorities are reduced power consumption, reliability, size and quiet operation over gargantuan storage then the DS411slim will impress.
