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Those of you who have been following our recent NAS reviews will have noticed that Synology recently released the latest version of their operating system which is fully multitasking, allowing the user to switch between applications and tasks. We think its a fantastic operating system and is worth another look in this review.
When the system is first powered up the Synology Assistant shows any compatible devices on the network. Most Synology devices require the firmware to be installed before they can be used.
The newest firmware files can be downloaded from the Synology website, but in this case as the product was not released at time of review we used the file on the software disc supplied. The procedure takes about 10 minutes in total.
Diskmanager 3.0 is a small overhead, multitasking operating system which is based around an extremely responsive, easy to use user interface.
There is fully support for Jumbo frames up to 9k, which obviously needs support from the rest of the network, including any switches incorporated.
The first course of action will be to set up the hard drives installed. We use two 1TB drives for our testing, although the DS411j can support up to 8TB of data across 4 x 2TB drives, more than enough for general home and small office demands.
Setting up volumes and Raid configurations is a straightforward process, guided with step by step panels on screen. The DS411j supports a proprietary Synology Hybrid Raid configuration as well as JBOD, Raid 0, Raid 1, Raid 5, Raid 5+ Spare, Raid 6 and Raid 10. The operating system can offer migration such as Basic to RAID 1, Basic to RAID 5, Basic to RAID 5+Spare, RAID 1 to RAID 5, RAID 1 to RAID 5+Spare, RAID 5 to RAID 5+Spare, RAID 5 to RAID 6. Additionally pre configured Raid volumes can be expanded with larger hard drives.
Folders can be shared across the network with up to 1024 user accounts via 256 user groups with 256 shared folders per install.
As would be expected there is full Macintosh support and we experienced no issues with cross platform compatibility, between PC and Macintosh machines in our network.
The operating system has a monitoring system similar to the Windows panels, showing CPU overhead as well as memory demands and network activity.
Any partitions can be analysed and hard drive temperatures can be monitored. The interface is fully featured and covers most bases. While we noticed that this system wasn't as fast as some of the higher end models we have reviewed before, it is still capable of multitasking through various panels, even when mid way through a Raid configuration. It is impressive especially when you consider there is only 128MB of ram onboard.
Diskstation 3.0 includes many media and automated options, such as
Download Station functions as a 24×7 BitTorrent, FTP, HTTP, eMule, and NZB download center without a PC. The eMule download engine allows search-n-download capability with a web-browser without installing additional desktop applications.
Audio Station supports music, Internet radio stations, and iPod playback with the optional speakers. An optional direction-free Synology Remote allows you to freely enjoy your music. Streaming mode allows your music to be shared with multiple users over the Intranet or Internet.
DLNA/UPnP Compliant Media Server allows you to stream multimedia files with an UPnP Digital Media Adapter (DMA) to a stereo system or a TV-set. Sony PS3 and Microsoft Xbox360 are also supported.
iTunes Server is an easy way to share music with other iTunes clients over the network. Password protection prevents unauthorized sharing.
Photo Station simplifies photo, video, and blog sharing over the Internet. The flexibility of photo theme customization, blog layout arrangement, visitor’s privilege setting, RSS feed, and the dazzling 3-dimentional photo browsing with Cooliris make Photo Station your state-of-the-art lifestyle sharing center on the Internet.
Web Station with built-in PHP+MySQL allows you to publish your own websites or install numerous popular open source programs.
Frequently used programs can be pinned to the taskbar for easy access later. There are many nice touches throughout which we are sure will be enhanced further as time progresses.
