Customer Reviews

Synology DiskStation 4-Bay 1.28 TB (4 x 320 GB) 2.5 Inch HDD Network Attached Storage DS409Slim 4030 (Black)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is my second Synology NAS (the other one is a CS407) and I am greatly satisfied with it.

Pros:
(1) It is small, really small for a 4 drive NAS.
(2) Very very quiet. Synology website rates the CS407 at 23db and the DS409slim at 24db. However in my opinion the ds409slim is almost silent and the CS407 is not.
(3) Although it uses 2.5 hds, it supports the 12.5mm height ones that allow you (as of 04/10) 4TB total storage.
(4) Rock solid, proven linux os.
(5) Tons of functionality appart from standard NAS services (web server, bittorrent client, rsync server for backup, etc), and on to it allows you to add custom software (e.g. subversion server).
(6) Nice and easy to manage configuration software.

Cons:
(1) Price. 2.5" drives are relatively more expensive than their 3.5" counterparts (2+ times at 1TB).
(2) 2.5" drives limit the storage capacity.


W.r.t noise, I have to say that one of the reasons that my ds409slim is much quieter than my cs407 is that the 2.5" drives I used are very silent (5400rpm WD blue) and the 3.5" are not so much (2 hitachi 7200rpm and 1 samsung 7200rpm).

I have been lurking on the NAS scene for my home for quite some time. I had two dedicated Windows machines acting as file servers to host about 1TB of data and kept mirrors of the data on different hard drives using SmartSync Pro. Has been working great for years, but I recently switched over the family to Macs and I started to loathe the management of the Windows boxes. Plus both Windows machines are ancient fill tower rigs, running 24x7 with 400W power supplies and totaling 12 IDE drives... This was a huge space, power and noise concern as well.

Synology makes a wide range of NAS solutions for home, small office/home office and enterprise situations. There are so many models it is actually a little confusing where a SO/HO should end up - picking between the Junior (j) line, the standard line or the + line is tough and will involve you weighing the various tradeoffs between price, performance and expandability.

I decided on the DS409slim because it address my three secondary concerns while completely fulfilling my primary concern - network aware, fault tolerant disk access. This unit is TINY (as in palm sized), practically silent and uses very little power, both under load and when idle. Installation was a cinch, took as long to open the box and pull out the instructions as it took to screw in the drives and slide in the trays. In about 30 minutes I had a 750GB 3 disk RAID 5 NAS using drives I had sitting around the house. I have since done both horizontal expansion (adding a new drive) and vertical expansion (replacing a drive with one of larger capacity) and the Synology Disk Station software has made it painless and quite simple to do. I am currently running 4x500GB Seagate Momentus 7200rpm drives in a 1.5TB RAID 5 array.

I have been able to stream video/music/photos to my XBox 360 and PS3 without a hitch. My DirecTV HR20-100 can do music and photos, but cannot display the format I have the videos encoded in.

I love this little box and should have gotten one years ago. I am planning on getting one of Synology's other offerings for my dad so he cn get rid of the 3+ external drives he has hooked up to his computers and get a single NAS solution and recover some desk space.

Synology tech support, website and web forum appears to be responsive and has good online documentation.

Overall I'm very happy with the Synology DS409slim. I purchased this device along with four Western Digital 5400RPM 320GB drives (from Amazon) for quite a bit less than the preconfigured model.

Setup was relatively painless. I think the most difficult part was to screw the hard drives to the cages, which wasn't even that bad. I configured my unit to be RAID5 + Spare, formatting of the drives took about 2 hours and then I was ready to go.

The built in software works well for what it is. Since it's running Linux, if the built-in software doesn't fit my needs I can probably find an alternative to install.

I particularly like some of the security features. One particular feature will block access to an IP address that has made too many invalid log-in attempts, which is reassuring since I have part of the interface exposed to the internet. Synology recently added the ability to encrypt file shares. I've encrypted one directory so far, it was very simple to do and seemless to the client PC.

I've been using the device for a few weeks now and everything has been running smoothly. The device is fitting for the intended purpose I purchased it for: to host multimedia files and provide a safe repository for my important files.

Surprisingly easy to set up for basic use.
Screw hard drives to the tray, check online to update software.
Server works well with windows, ubuntu, iPhone, samsung tv.
Works as a printer driver too. Wish there were more usb ports.
Very quiet and a small footprint.

As much as I hate to say this, the Synology engineers failed miserably on this device, and I very strongly regret having purchased it.

First Synology product I bought was a DS101g+, which I've had up and running for maybe 4 years now without problems. I first tried to save a buck by purchasing an eSATA RAID enclosure from another manufacturer to add onto the DS101g+, but that ended up failing on me, so I decided to go back to the name I trusted and purchase the brand spanking new DS409slim.

It seemed like a win-win at the time. I was looking for something safe (RAID 5 or RAID 10) to hold my digital photos and other files securely, and the low power usage and small form factor was appealing to me. I had some concerns about the reliability of laptop drives, but I figured with RAID 10, a cold spare, and decent HD warranties I'd be OK.

What I didn't know at the time, but found out just under a year later was that most laptop drives have a head parking feature for power conservation that doesn't play nicely with Linux (a flavor of which is what the Synology devices run). Fast forward to 11 months of solid uptime with light usage and my RAID comes crashing down. After sliding in the cold spare, another aspect of the incompatibility of standard laptop drives with a RAID configuration (which I won't go into detail about here, but you can read in the WD forums) kicks in and another of my drives drops out of the RAID. Luckily I was able to transfer all my data off the device before anything was lost, but this was a massive pain to move all the data around when I'd purchased this device specifically for data safety and convenience.

Now, you may be saying at this point: "You can't blame Synology for you choosing to use laptop drives that aren't meant for RAID configurations!", but you would be wrong, here's why: Even if I had set up the 4 drives as independent volumes, the head parking mechanism would still cause them to fail in an unreasonably short time (around a year as we saw). Worse still, not having had them in a RAID, I would have lost everything on the disks.

But then you may say: "But you should have used enterprise class 2.5 inch drives, and preferably ones meant for RAID configurations!" And you would be right about that, *if* there *were* any enterprise class drives thin enough to fit into the DS409slim. The DS409slim was designed to work with *laptop* hard drives --- it can not accommodate a 2.5 inch server class drive, which are thicker; at least I am not aware of any such drives that exist, and there are none listed amongst the compatible drives on the Synology web site.

Sure I could load this thing up with SSDs, and maybe that's what I eventually will do in the distant future when they're cheap as dirt. In the meantime I may be shelving it and replacing it with a DS710+, which is probably what I should have gone with in the first place. (It's got a beefier processor too that would be great for running the Synology DSM3 features, which honestly the DS409slim processor and memory was a little inadequate to run.) Whatever I thought I was saving in power consumption with this product I've paid for with time and aggravation a hundred times over.

Avoid the DS409slim (and its replacement the DS411slim) like the plague until somebody manufactures a hard drive that you'd actually trust your data on to put in it. Right now, I don't see any that exist, and I've been looking a fair bit. You don't have to listen to me, but you can remember that I warned you when it happens to you.