Synology Cube Station CS407 does DIY NAS

Don't fancy picking up a fully configured NAS with a bunch of off-the-shelf drives? Well then, Synology's Cube Station CS407 might be the NAS for you. Coming bare bones with four slots for SATA hard disk drives of your choice, the CS407 includes out of the box support for iTunes serving, a PhotoStation2 image hosting service, and PHP and MySQL support. It has a Gigabit Ethernet port, low power consumption, quiet operation, and came out OK in the performance tests that Hot Hardware carried out. The CS407 ain't perfect though, with its slightly dodgy build quality, standard rack mounts for Hard Drives, and slightly dear price tag of around $649.

[Wolfticket Posted Sep 1st 2007 8:54PM]

Ignoring the specifics of this box for a mo, I'm always one to go for the diy external storage over of the shelf. After all, how often do hard drive interfaces change? Once a decade or so? And how quickly do hard drives double in capacity for the same price? Once a year?
Of the shelf, non-upgradable storage devices just seem wasteful.

[klinquist Posted Sep 1st 2007 9:10PM]

The drobo has none of these features, but I find it to be a more valuable device - just for the ease of use. Seamlessly pop drives of any size in and out, no screws...

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 1st 2007 9:59PM]

I would rather rock a Windows Home Server.

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 1st 2007 10:29PM]

I would rather rock my own box, running windows home server.

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 2nd 2007 10:32PM]

i would rather Rock & Roll

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 2nd 2007 12:30AM]

It strikes me the last thing we need is another $650 bare bones NAS chassis. With the thecus N5200 pro (and providing 5 instead of 4 SATA slots) and the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ both doing the same thing with a more mature feature set in the same price range, I expect this thing to provide raided e-sata ports or at the very least make me some toast.

Or they could drop the price by $100+, that might sell me too.

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 2nd 2007 3:32AM]

I'm a bit confused. What do they mean by "barebones"? Barebones generally means no CPU and no memory. And if that's the case, this things is a horrible ripoff at $650.

But it sounds like it already has it's own NAS software built in. Suggesting you don't need to buy a CPU and memory.

Anyway, I hope people are familiar with FreeNAS (freenas.org). You couldn't ask for more. It even supports AFP sharing for all the Engadget Apple fanboys.

[asicking Posted Sep 2nd 2007 7:38AM]

I have this box at home running a simple RAID1 (2x500G) NAS on a Gbit Ethernet LAN. I got a factory refurb model so the cost of the NAS plus the 2 drives came in at the list price of the NAS alone. Its quiet and fast -- so far I'm liking it a lot.

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 2nd 2007 10:10AM]

Silly people. For less money, go out and get yourselves a used junk laptop and an Addonics storage tower (http://addonics.com/products/raid_system/). The machine will serve whatever protocols you like and you can even hang several towers off the laptop -- i.e. expansion is only a bit more than $100 per box, not a whole new $700.

Right now I have more than 1TB being served by a P3 256M IBM -- that also happens to handle my (very low activity) web server, the ssh portal into the house, and calendar messaging.

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 2nd 2007 5:36PM]

I just got a Drobo a couple weeks back... haven't looked back. It's simple, looks like like a regular old drive to my Mac and seems speedy enough over USB. I suppose if I wanted to network it, I could hook it up to that new Airport base station Apple sells and share it like that but seeing as I only have one computer, it's not needed.

Besides -- how starved is the market for NAS that something like this is really required? It seems to me that Joe Consumer wouldn't grab this from Best Buy and people in the 'Engadget market segment' if you will are going to 1) build their own or 2) buy a more robust solution.

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 4th 2007 2:44PM]

I own a synology unit. Love it. Recomend it every chance I get. Love the drag and drop torrent downloading station functionality. My PC is off yet the box downloads away. Use it as an itunes server and run a php mysql website off of it as well.

[(Unverified) Posted Nov 2nd 2007 2:34PM]

Полная жопа , ничего непонятно.