Synology DS710+

We’ve had many NAS (Network Attached Storage) drives come through our doors lately, and while the DS710+ from Taiwanese storage company Synology certainly isn’t the cheapest, it does offer a comprehensive suite of features which will have a wide appeal from small to medium-sized businesses, to rabid media enthusiasts.

Driven by an energy-efficient Intel Atom D410 running at 1.67GHz with 1GB of RAM, the DS710+ has dual drive bays meaning a maximum of 4TB can be loaded into it via two 2TB hard drives. No drives ship with the unit by default, but any 3.5in or 2.5in SATAII hard drive or SSD can be loaded into the hot-swappable bays.

On the front of the unit there are the standard activity and status LED indicators, power and clear function buttons, plus a USB port for backing up or transferring data from a USB drive.

At the back there are the two ports where the drives are inserted – these aren’t lockable but there is a safety catch to prevent accidental removal. There is also a VGA port for monitoring an IP camera via LAN, two more USB connections, Gigabit Ethernet port, power socket, Kensington lock, and an eSATA connection for hooking the device up to Synology’s optional DX510 expansion unit, allowing up to seven drives in total to be connected.

Initial setup is done via the Assistant utility on the supplied CD, and disk management is performed via the browser-based Disk Station Manager which is surprisingly user-friendly for a machine with such complex features. This is also where you can configure RAID functionality (RAID 0 and 1, plus 5 and 6 with the DX510 unit).
Sharing and access privileges can be administered at both a user and group level, and quotas can be set to cap the amount of space set aside for each user.