Customer Reviews

Synology Disk Station 4-Bay 4 TB (4 x 1 TB) Network Attached Storage DS409 4100 (Black)

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

 

 

I had a friend recommend another NAS type to me, but when I read thru the Amazon reviews, I couldn't go for it. In fact, if you search on NAS at Amazon and then look at the feedback, you'll find that most of the NAS vendors have terrible customer service. I literally picked out my NAS by reading Amazon reviews. Synology was about the only company that people weren't ready to tar and feather.

I'm happy with my purchase. With 4 1TB drives, it draws about 18-20 watts when idle. Maybe 35 when busy. They have a built in timer system to shut it down at a selected hour and then reboot it back when you choose. It's quiet. It can do all sorts of stuff (email server, web server, DLNA server, etc.). I can write to it at 30 MB/sec and read back at >50 MB/sec. Biggest key is that they have a very active community and forums and the customer service people actually seem to care about problems.

I've only owned it a month and haven't really encountered any issues. I'd give it 5 stars if I'd owned it a year and it continued to work as it is now.

While I was making big changes to my two XP towers and putting a new Win7 laptop online, a major reorg of storage and backup was going to happen anyway, so what better time to move to NAS. Then the question of which box. After reading every review I could find both on Amazon and elsewhere, I decided Synology was a good bet and along the way I liked the fact that its software is open source, which (sometimes) says that the vendor knows they are going to have to make an extra effort to get the product right. For this product, I'd say that expectation turns out to be justified. The DS2xx or DS4xx were the finalists and at the last minute I took the advice of a reviewer and went for the extra $ for 4 disks instead of 2, and very glad I did. My guess (and it is still a guess) was that it was not worth more $ to upgrade from the 16-bit CPU, therefore a DS409 choice. The diskless option was great because I had spare disks freed up by the equipment reorg.

The DS409 does NAS well and I can't think of a reason to rate it anything less than the 5 stars. It has all kinds of features that I don't use (music player, video camera monitoring, web server, etc. etc. etc.) but they aren't installed by default, so no impact. With the client PC's that have Gig ethernet adapters, I see 20 to high 30's for writing and 30's to high 60's for reading, depending on file size and the application and all the other stuff that affects internal disks as well. Set up and running in a couple of hours, very quiet, zero problems. The vendor has a good web site and firmware updates are easy.

Some config notes in case they provide ideas: I set up two 1T disks doing RAID 1 in slot 1 and 2 for second-tier storage, left slot 3 spare, put a slower low power 2T green drive in slot 4 for backups, all Western Digital. I used a drive that's about a year old in slot 1 and a new drive in slot 2 to maybe skew their eventual failure times. Two 1T external USB drives are rotated between one of the USB ports and a media safe, and the backup software on the DS409 (not software on client PC's) automatically makes a clone of the RAID 1 storage. I archive the slot 4 disk contents manually to other USB disks on a separate schedule.

i've been searching for an easy nas for my home wireless network for a while. it had to handle at least 4 drives and not consume too much electricity. this one fit the bill. the installation and interface is very easy. i installed 4 wd green 1.5 tb drives and it streams my burned dvd files over the wireless-n without a hitch. i haven't had to reboot it since i got it, other than to update the firmware. this is a plug it in and forget about it device. i'm happy with it.

there are a few things that kept it from 5 stars. for instance, the music player is unnecesary since it's so inferior to even windows media player. i plugged an e-sata drive into the port, but i think it's only designed to work with their own expansion device. haven't looked into it yet. i plugged my external drives into the usb ports to copy all the content over. that worked great.

there are a lot of features that i don't use, like all the functions for accessing it remotely, so i can't comment on that.

I got a DS409 about a year ago and the bottom line is that I'm happy with it and it just plain works.
I filled mine with 4x 1TB hitachi drives. Installation was trivial and I set it up using RAID 5+6 (in retrospect I think the RAID 5+6 is a tad overkill and just RAID 5 will do the job and give you a tad more space.)

Configuration is done through a nice web interface.
At first I was only using the "storage" service, but I started using services: Samba & FTP shares, different users with different access controls, itunes/dlna server for music, storage for my surveillance webcams.
There are a few other services like file download station, blog & pictures and web server that I tried. They are OK but frankly if you're any bit serious just get yourself a small linux box to do these.

All the above services can be configured from the web interface, which is well done, has some actual help and works fine with Chrome and Firefox. The surveillance station part (to monitor webcams) does require some ActiveX stuff to view recordings, however the setup of the recording does not require it.

It runs a Linux flavor. You can get root SSH access with busybox and install a variety of things using "ipkg", but the point is that you _don't_ have to (and frankly if you're not comfortable with it, don't try, unless you like nixing your own backup server?)

As for security, I don't know. I didn't look carefully at the opened ports. I would personally not expose this directly to the net since you'd be at the mercy of the myriad of worms and other port scanners with no ability to lock down your system.

As for the NAS part, it just works. I use it both with Windows and Linux clients, and it streams music and video just fine, as well as perform backup tasks.

We are a full time Pro Photography studio. This is our primary storage/server for three computers. We don't know a lot about the technology of this but we can tell you it is easy to install, easy to use and we have had not a single problem with it for the six months that it's online. We installed four 1TB enterprise HD's and run it in mirror mode. It turns itself off at night and is back on when we arrive in the morning. It is plenty fast for uploading files to Lightroom and opening files in Photoshop CS5. Previuosly we used a Buffalo Terastation with which we were pleased. Went with the DS409 based on reviews and price. We are very happy with this device and would definitely purchase again.

So far it is working great and it is wonderful to have so much storage attached to my computer.