Synology's Disk Station DS-207+ is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device that allows you to share your files with any computer on your network. You have to add your own hard disks, but the DS-207+ can accommodate two SATA disks, which you can configure as a RAID array.
The DS-207+ is attractive and compact, but there's no room for disk trays. Instead, you have to slide off the plastic cover, use a screwdriver to fix the hard disks in place and connect SATA data and power cables between the disks and the circuit board. This process is more time consuming than it should be.
When configured as a RAID 0 array, Windows sees the two disks as a single large drive, but if a disk should fail, you will lose all your data. As a RAID 1 array, only half the total capacity of the two disks is available for use, but a copy of your data is automatically maintained on the second disk.
The graphs below show the speeds attained by the DS-207+ with the disks in a RAID 0 configuration. We were pleasantly surprised by the fast transfer speeds for large files, but small files performance is sluggish. The large files test was slower with the disks configured as a RAID 1 array, copying files at 16.03MB/s, but a little faster in our small files test, at 1.69MB/s.
The DS-207+ has plenty of extra features. It worked well as an iTunes server, but while it should be able to play music from an iPod plugged into one of its three USB ports, it didn't recognise either a FAT32 or HFS+ formatted iPod. You can also play music through a web interface, but this is clumsy and has few advantages over using the DS-207+ as a UPnP server with Windows Media Player.
Standard DivX clips stored on the DS-207+ played smoothly on both a PC and a network media player. It struggled a bit with large video files, though. There were some dropped frames when changing chapters in a DVD movie, and the audio in a high-definition WMV file occasionally fell out of sync with the video, though performance will depend on your network.
We had no trouble printing to a USB printer or sharing a USB disk connected to the DS-207+. The DiskStation can also be used to download files from the web or over Bittorrent when your PC is off, saving electricity. Plus, you can use it as a webserver; it supports MySQL and PHP. Less usefully, the DS-207+ can also be used as a photo server, but it offers little advantage over websites such as Flickr unless you're paranoid about uploading personal photos to someone else's server.
We were impressed with the DS-207+'s performance with large files, but it is slow at copying small files, so using it for a system backup could prove frustrating. The DS-207+ is expensive for a NAS kit without any disks. It has some useful extras, but some are superfluous so make sure you need them before you buy.
System Specifications
10/100/1,000Mbit/s network connection, three USB ports, eSATA port, UPnP media server, FTP server, iTunes server, web server, takes two 3½in SATA hard disks
Author: Alan Lu
Computer Shopper Online