Synology CubeStation 4-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage CS407ÿ (White)

by Synology

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00103MD6A
• Item model number: CS407ÿ
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 20, 2007

Product Description

CS407 is designed with Windows ADS authentication, USB printer sharing, dynamic website hosting, and data backup. With terabyte competency and hi-performance file sharing, CS407 gives business users the freedom to store massive data efficiently. The RAID 1/5 protection further prevents data loss from inevitable disaster.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great product , great support !, April 29, 2009

By 

LKR "LKR" (Israel) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Synology CubeStation 4-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage CS407ÿ (White) (Personal Computers)

Just wanted to report wonderful experience I had with Synology support.

Almost 2 years ago I bought CS-407 NAS put in it 4x1TB drives and created RAID 5 array.

About two weeks ago one of the HDDs "died" - [Please control your language] happens :) that's why we have RAID 5 ,right ? Well it's correct unless you connect SATA cables after replacing the broken hard drive to the wrong drives as I did :(
First I did not noticed it but when system started and reported "volume crashed" (crashed not "degraded") I pretty soon "noticed" it and connected everything back , however damage was already done - disk was marked as "wrong" and about 2TB of data was lost :(

Hoping that data is still "somewhere there" I contacted the Synology and get the list of instructions on how to forward the ports and setup other things so [b]their technician will be able to connect and fix" ! WOW !!

I did so and the connected, they said that they in addition to my problem see some problem with SATA cables so they ON THEIR own and FREE shipped me full set of cables (and it's almost after two years since I bought the NAS) !
After I recieved the cables and replaced them they connected again and rescued all my data !

So I way WOW - that was the level of support everyone should have and that was the level of support I had never seen so far.

So I am posting this as a "thank you" to Synology - they cost more but they do much more :)

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great media server and backup for peace of mind, May 4, 2008

By 

JB Shmults (Franklin, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Synology CubeStation 4-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage CS407ÿ (White) (Personal Computers)

I finally bought the Synology CubeStation after doing a lot of research and deciding that I don't want any of the NAS that have tons of negative reviews posted, mostly for non-existing service and high failure rates. The 407 is expensive, but I have too many irreplaceable photos and a very large music collection to loose any of it. I run a RAID on my main workstation, but have no security on the other PCs. I ran a Maxtor 300GB shared drive for 2 years, but it occasionally hangs up, is slow and data are lost if the drive croaks.

The Synology is very easy to set up, has a great design, drives run very cool, very quiet operation and so far no problems at all. Took me 20 min to set up, all night for drive check and another 10 hours for the first 300 GB backup of all PCs in the house. Also, the Synology is not limited to 1 or 2 GB, you can fully load it with 4x 750GB. I am running it with three 500GB drives with 32mb cache in a RAID 5 configuration (redundancy built-in, you get about 2/3 of the nominal disk space, ~940GB in my case). Very nice web AJAX interface. Highly recommended! I wanted to be future-proof for as long as possible and opted to pay the extra $100 to get the black 407 instead of the 407e, which has a slower processor, but otherwise, they are identical in functionality.

Cons: Inserting or exchanging drives is a little too cumbersome, with access from the back and all cables in the way. There are other solutions, which provide front access and slick drive bays (DROBO, HP Mediasmart). Also, hot-swap would be a nice touch, although I hope to never have to use it! And, of course, this is too pricey for the mainstream. Backup software is too limited, doesn't allow to save multiple schedules / backup schemes.

The box looks better in a real office and is smaller than it appears in ads. This is a great solution for home or small business and for those people who are willing to pay for peace of mind and a real backup solution. Make sure to upgrade the firmware first thing, it is substantially more usable and powerful than what comes in the box!

Additional comments:
Almost 3 years later, I am still very happy about this solution! Reliability of the system is excellent (data reliability, of course, depends on that of your drives). I have had no issues at all and only occasionally clean the front grills with a dust blower to keep the drives cool. This little device even emails me when it restarts after a power out! Firmware is very actively updated and always adds useful features, upgrading is very easy to do. Very highly recommended, great device.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Love it love it love it, May 15, 2009

By 

John Wei - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Synology CubeStation 4-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage CS407ÿ (White) (Personal Computers)

I've had this NAS for almost a year now and love it. I use it to store my entire iTunes library, all my videos and photos, and as a webserver to share all my photos.

It has a built-in iTunes server, but it's more clever to set it up as a network shared drive. For each of the client PCs, you can use "net use" with the /savecred and /persistent:yes flags to save the NAS login and password. Then modify the iTunes XML files to point to the network drive, and voila, each computer thinks it owns the iTunes library locally. Playlists and DRM should share happily.

The photo webserver is pretty slick, auto-thumbnails, and has a very clean interface. I have it set so that new folders automatically become public, so as soon as I save an image to my network drive, it's auto-shared. No need for extra steps to post to Flickr or Picassa or whatever. New sub-folders in private folders are never made public, so that's where I put pictures that I don't want shared. Or, it's super easy to tweak each directory's permissions. I use dyndns.org (one of the default supported services) to manage the public IP address, but I do have to manually go in and refresh it every couple of weeks when my ISP resets it. There may be an automatic solution for this, but haven't tried that hard.

The last thing to note is that you should read the Synology forums carefully. Not all hard drives will work nicely with this. I wanted 1 TB drives, and at the time there was only 1 Seagate drive that was fully functional. That's not the greatest thing if you're depending on the RAS functionality. If you have all identical drives in your array, that significantly increases the odds that you'll have more than one drive failure at the same time, if it's due to a manufacturing defect. Should still be a rare occurrence, but something to be aware of.