The Synology DS110+ is a One Bay NAS Box aimed at the small to medium business market. It comes supplied with no hard drive (you fit your own capacity), has an eSATA and 3 x USB ports to add additional storage to the device plus it is fitted with a gigabit Ethernet port for high speed data transfer.

Unboxing the device

All synology NAS devices are well packaged with a carrying handle for easy transportation once it arrives or you buy it from the store. Inside you will find the device itself, a power cable, a power supply unit, RJ45 Network cable, a packet of screws to hold the harddrive in, a packet of screws to secure the unit and finally a manual plus CD to install the device.

Putting the device togther

The unit come unscrewed and its a simple case of sliding the top across and you end of with two pieces, one is the top and the other has the electronics stored inside. It is obvious were the drive goes:

With the drive placed in the holder and pushed into place, its is secured and you can refit the top, again there is screws supplied in the box which fit on the back. Once everything is ready – you now need to plug this into the power and into a network point, either on a router or a switch – the faster the network, the better it will perform.

Setting up the device for first time use.

Before you start, it is best to head off to the synology web site and download the latest firmware, make sure you remember to select the correct device from the drop down as it defaults to the DS1010+. Once you have the file saved, extract this to a place you know and now insert the CD that came with the device. This is one product that you actually need the CD that comes in the box as this prepares the harddrive to hold not only the firmware but also formats the drive. Once the process has finished (it will take a while) you can now go into a web page and manage the device from there.

The Basics

You need to create some users so that you can access the shares later, it can tap into Windows Server Active directory if you are a company or simply match the users on the NAS box with your windows login. You need to prepare the drive, I found with this device though it had already set up the drive for me on the first part of the install. You then need to create some shares and give people (users) permission – you can have as many or a few as you require at this stage.

Technical Info

It has a 1.06Ghz CPU with a 64bit DDR533 Memory Bus which supports floating point.

It comes with 512MB Ram, 3 USB Ports, 1 eSATA Port and supports a max of 12 IP Webcams.

Performance

Windows Upload/Download⁽¹⁾ (5GB File)

Netbench⁽²⁾

Encrypted file Upload/Download⁽³⁾ (5GB File)

iSCSI Upload/Download⁽⁴⁾ (5GB File)

Web Server Responsiveness⁽⁵⁾ (1,000x requests)

Photo Converting⁽⁶⁾ (54MB of Photos)

Price of this device

I did some searching around and I found the price on average of £230, I failed to find as USA Prices. You may well ask why a 1 Bay NAS box with no drives costs more then the 2 Bay DS210J (my other device) and the answer is performance, number of IP webcams out of the box supported and a eSATA Port – all pointing to a business use rather than home. The graphs above bear this out and its clear why the price is more.

The different products from Synology

Synology provide a page to compare all the products and the best way to think about this is to ask yourself were is the product going to be used, how many people will access this at one time, how much storage do you need and how much you are will to spend on a NAS Box.

Why Synology?

There is a lot of companies out there who sell a NAS device and while I was looking, I found some lacked in features (as in they had none), some limited the size of the hard drive and some were plain slow. Remember not only are you getting a NAS device which can support the largest drives but they come packed with features such as:

• Photo Station – share your pictures and videos easily.
• Download Station – leave this device to get the files without having to leave computers switched on.
• Webstation – have your own unlimited website which supports PHP and MySQL
• Audio Station – share you music via a web page, itunes and any other music player.

Plus many many more – head HERE to see everything that is on offer…

I recently bought the Synology DS210J NAS Box plus a couple of Seagate Barracuda ST32000542AS 2TB 3.5″ SATA II Hard Drive, this was to give me a shared network storage space of 4TB (well under 4TB once formatted) and be able to store all of my data requirements for now and in the future. I agree that 4TB will be used up and as this is only a 2Bay device – no way to expand internally but we shall cross that bridge when we come to it.

Why did I choose this device?

I knew what I needed out of a NAS box in that I did not want to spend too much money on the enclosure alone but at the same time I did not want it to be restricted to how big a hard drive I can fit into there. I also wanted the various servers many include such as Torrent server, iTunes Server and so forth. I pulled up a shopping site and listed the NAS Box’s starting from the cheapest and working my way down. Many were very bad design and had bad write ups and the rest were limited to say 500GIG drives (x2) and so forth. I read nothing but good reviews about the DS210J – it came in at £136 so that was not too bad, yes there was cheaper 2 Bay devices out there but a lot was missing.

What size drive to buy?

The next step was to work out which drives to buy, I already have 1 internal 1TB Drive in my Dell, do I just buy another 1TB Drive (which are very cheap at the moment) and live with 2TB max storage space? In fact I could have bought the Edimax NS-2502 NAS Box,which was only £99 and added that 1TB drive (£49) and spent half of what I did BUT I would have been limited to 2TB only and I know for a fact I can use this space quickly.

The Seagate Barracuda ST32000542AS 2TB 3.5″ SATA II Hard Drive is £76 – this is at the moment the cheapest drive from the site I was on – remember I wanted to save on shipping costs.

The initial setup

The device comes with no screws in, this allows you to slide the top of and you will see the bay for the two drives. The drive simply slides in, one on top of another and the install is done. You then use the supplied bag of screws to secure the drives and slide the top cover back on. You will find another bag of screws and these keep the unit as one, you are now ready to get the device on the network and set it up.  Plug it in to the wall socket, plug the network lead into your router and switch on – now we move onto the software side.

You use the supplied CD and this does the initial process of finding the device on the network and installing something to the hard drive (firmware). This is a very short step and it soon open your default browser and from here – all set up is via the network / web browser.

As this is the initial setting up of the drives you just installed, we need to go to the Management section.

The storage section is were you create a new volume and you have a choice of automated set-up (where it choose what mode to format your drives) or custom. After choosing custom, it gives you the option first of checking your drives for bad blocks which it explains will take longer to complete and what type of volume you require. As you can see on the screenshot, it does tell you about each type on the right. In my case, I wanted the full capacity of the drives so RAID 1 was no good to me (as I would only have 2TB), so I choose RAID 0 – downside to this is that if the drive fails – I loose everything.

I started this process at 6pm on the 3rd Aug and it was checking the drive. at 8am the next morning, it finally finished that part and then proceed to do another check. I assume it is checking each drive in turn for bad sectors and 14 hours per drive is a long time but is it not better to be safe then sorry even if it takes me 3 days at this rate to format the drive.

What else can this thing do?

As it has not completed a full format, I plugged in a 60GIG USB Drive, this came up and I was able to share this out straight away. I was then able to test out the download station. While some NAS boxes have a torrent server (normally transmission) this goes one step further. You get a client which you can install on your windows, Linux or Mac box and you can send most downloads to this and the NAS box picks up and grabs the content. It can handle torrent files, NZB (News servers), emule and FTP along with others. The handy thing about this is you can let the NAS box get on with the task of downloading the files long after you have switched off all your computers and fell alseep.

Other servers?

The box has many others to choose from and as it runs linux, you can add extra one’s such as a email server or a squeezebox server. This is not meant to be a definate all in one review of this unit, this is to come later once I have the drive formatted and the files all stored on there. So far then – I am 100% more happy with this device then the Pogoplug for example or even the DIY NAS Box I built with FreeNAS.

USB expansion

I plan to plug in 2x 1TB external USB Drives and a 500GIG Model to give me 7TB+ of space – this should keep me going for a while and I can stop worry about were to store a file.

**Update**

It finished formatting the drives after the second round of checking at 10:30pm and then I had to tick the various services (photostation, itunes server etc) for it to make the automated directories of Audio, Video, Music. I went into Share management and added other directories I need and set permissions on that all as read/write. The box now appears in network neighbourhood and I can map drives as required.

The Acer Revo R600 is what is termed a NetTop PC, this been very small form factor, cheap and low wattage desktop computer. I Spotted this on sale at ebuyer via a mail shot for £149.99. What do you get for the money? Is it a good media centre PC? Can it play games? Read on to find out more.

Specs

Intel Atom 230 1.6GHz

NVIDIA® ION™ chipset

1 x 1GB DDR2 800 SDRAM

160GB Serial ATA II

nVidia ION Graphics

High Definition audio (7.1) Audio

Wireless & Wired connections

Interfaces

• 6 x USB 2.0 ports
• Four-in-one card reader
• High definition headphone and microphone jacks
• DC-in jack
• Ethernet port
• D-Sub VGA port
• HDMI port
• eSATA port

Dimensions : 180 x 180 x30 mm

Verdict

The Intel Atom 230 CPU running at 1.6Ghz is about right for this small a desktop and while netbook struggle to cope with HD, when paired with the nVidia ION Graphics, it can handle HD in 720 and with a few tweaks to the settings, can even handle HD 1080P. Game is not realyl on the cards, maybe at a low resolution and settings but this is not what this machine is aimed at. If you wanted something small and cheap which can run 24/7 without burning to much electricity and no noise – such as running a web server, then this is also for you.