Synology DiskStation 209+
Network attached storage
Scott Bartley | Tuesday, May 26 2009This month sees Synology release an updated version of the excellent DS 207 (reviewed September 2007) network attached storage device called the DS209+.
Out of the box the unit looks all but identical to the older model and colour is the only difference we could spot. It sports two drive bays (you must install your own SATA-based hard drives in the DS 209+), an Ethernet port, USB and eSATA ports for plugging in external hard drives or printers you’d like to share across the network, and a handful of status lights offering at-a-glance information.
A quick refresher if you, like me, have trouble remembering back to 2007 – the DiskStation series of NAS boxes are a veritable Swiss Army Knife of tools and a single DS207 or DS209+ will quite happily act as a media server, web server, FTP server and even provide password protected access to your files via the internet.
One of the killer features of the DS207 was its ability to stream a wide variety of media files around a network to any number of devices. All of that multimedia functionality is carried over to the 209+, although, if you’re running the latest firmware update on the 207, there’s no obvious benefit held by the 209+ in terms of format support – the same file types are supported across the board. Since the DiskStation management software is also common across both new and old, on the face of it there seems very little to tell them apart when it comes to features and functionality. Delve into the specification sheet, however, and we see a number of performance-enhancing upgrades have been made to the hardware.
The CPU speed on the integrated controller chipset has been upped to 800MHz (from 266MHz on the 207 and 500MHz on the 207+) and RAM now sits at 512MB (up from 64MB on the 207 and 128MB on the 207+). These two upgrades alone mean the 209+ can operate at a much snappier pace when it comes to serving up media.
It’s also slightly quieter too. Synology measures the noise level of the new model at an average of 25dB – the old models chimed in at 30.5dB. The reason for the noise drop can be laid squarely at the feet of the slightly larger 70mm fan, which runs slower than the 60mm fan installed on the older models.
Maximum capacity has also been boosted with the upper limit now being 3TB as opposed to 2TB.
The number of webcams that the 209+ can operate has been doubled to 10.
Finally, the number of user accounts you can allocate for web access has been exponentially increased from 128 to 2,048.
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