Over the past few years, Synology have worked hard to drive their brand deep into the consideration set for anyone seriously considering a network attached storage drive. Once an unknown far-eastern entity, Synology is now rightly positioned in the premier league of NAS specialists with excellent software and a decent hardware selection to suit consumers, prosumers, small businesses and enterprises alike.
In the prosumer segment, the company’s DiskStation DS-411+II is the latest 4 bay model to hit the market. Released in April this year, the +II naming marks a refresh of the original DS-411 this year. With news of a refresh of Synology’s DiskStation Manager software too just announced, it’s a great time for WGS to catch up with Synology’s latest NAS.
What’s in the Box?
The DiskStation DS-411+II is attractively and securely presented in a branded Synology box. Unlike the company’s business-oriented products, Synology’s consumer packaging is bright and cheery.
Open up the box and you’ll discover:
- Synology DiskStation DS-411+II
- Power Cable and adaptor
- Ethernet cable
- Disk screws
- Getting started guide
- Installation software
Specifications
Unlike earlier DiskStation models which shipped with low performance System on Chip processors, Synology are equipping their modern DiskStations with single-core and, in the case of the DS411+II, dual-core Intel Atom processors. As there are many more features available on these newer NAS servers, that’s a necessary improvement. The new DiskStation ships with a 1.8 GHz Intel Atom D510 processor, and 1GB DDR2 RAM, which offers reasonable performance without heavy power consumption – the company quotes maximum power consumption at 60W in operation (20W during hibernation), which isn’t the most frugal NAS drive we’ve seen, but it’s certainly not going to bankrupt you.
The 4 in the DiskStation’s model number denotes that this is a 4 bay device – note that Synology generally ship their NAS servers without drives, although you can often find populated packages available from online resellers. The lack of drives should be remembered when you’re shopping around – ensure you’re clear whether the advertised price includes drives or whether you’ll need to spend extra. Four bays gives plenty of room for storage expansion, and the good news is that there’s full support for new 3TB drives, so you can fit a mighty 12TB of data internally on the DS-411+II – that’s going to keep all but the most data hungry going for quite some time. If you need external storage expansion at some point, two USB 2.0 ports plus an eSATA port are available on the rear of the device. At some point, we should expect to see an upgrade to USB 3.0 on these devices for the fastest speeds, but not at this point.
Fast data access over the network is supported by the provision of a single Gigabit Ethernet port. There’s no fancy dual Ethernet tricks such as link aggregation on this class of device, so if you’re looking for these kind of business class features, you’ll need to pitch higher up Synology’s product list.
Overall, it’s a competent hardware specification for 2011. There are no real fireworks, but the DS-411+II has everything it needs to do a decent job. For full details on the DiskStation DS-411+II’s specs, head over to synology.com.
Installation
As the DS-411+II ships in a diskless configuration, you’ll need to install 1 or more hard drives in the rear of the device. Installation is very easy. Simply remove the four thumb screws from the back panel, slip your drives in the drive trays located within, and secure with the screws included in the box contents. Slide the drive trays into the device, close up the back panel and power on. The device will initialise, and the sit patiently for you to install its software.
Synology’s installation disk includes a connector application called Synology Assistant which runs on a client computer (Mac, Windows and Linux all supported) to allow access and configuration of the DS-411+II. We’re using the Mac connector for this review, as we’ll be discussing some of the compatibility and feature enhancements Synology have included in the latest (beta) version of their Disk Station Manager operating system.
As you can see from the image above, the Synology Assistant will hunt out the DS-411+II on the network, listing pertinent network information should it be required. As noted, your new disks are completely empty, and that means we need to install the operating system on the device. Synology have just released a brand new beta of the latest version of their NAS OS, DiskStation Manager (DSM 3.2). As previously reported here at WGS, the update includes a wide variety of new features for Synology’s NAS servers – most notable is support for OSX 10.7 Lion, a new version of the Photo Station application, support for Google Cloud Print, a DSM Web App to support management of the device from mobile clients, plus a swathe of enhancements across the operating system.
Simply point the wizard to the downloaded beta file (174 MB), and an installation wizard will take care of the rest, formatting your drives, creating the required system partition and then installing the operating system. It’s a relatively painless operation that most users should be able to perform without too much trouble.
Once completed, you’ll see the device entry in Synology Assistant changes status to “Ready”, and of course, there’ll be a different OS version shown if you’ve installed the update.
Ensuring the device is highlighted, click Connect and your web browser should pop up with the DS-411+II’s web-based dashboard.
