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Synology Disk Station 409Slim
Laptop storage drives nano Nas box
The DS409 Slim ships without disks. However, our review sample was supplied with three 250GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue 5,400 rpm hard drives. We tested read and write performance using a single drive and then a RAID0 array striped across all three disks. To measure transfer speeds, we set up a 1GB RAM disk on a PC and then copied a 901MB to the NAS across a gigabit switch using Windows Explorer.
Price per gigabyte is an issue, but its energy saving is exceptional
The results were very impressive. When reading from all three drives configured in RAID 0, we achieved a blistering top speed of 63.9MB/s – a result with beats many far pricier products. Write performance was also excellent at 38.3MB/s. Dropping down to a two-drive configuration shows the DS409 Slim is still more than capable of beating the competition, with read speeds of over 50MB/s, beating Buffalo’s Terastation III even when the latter is operating with four drives.
Verdict
The DS409Slim will cost you more per Gigabyte than a similarly stocked 3.5in model, but offers excellent environmental characteristics – notably low noise and reduced power consumption. While it is tiny, it does lose out on sheer build quality to the likes of Qnap or the pricier Buffalo units, due to its plastic construction. But when it comes to features and performance, the DS409Slim makes no compromises. ®
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