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The Silverstone DC01S is a simple, yet useful device, and in essence it has been stripped down to the essentials. It emits very little noise depending on the hard drive you are using and we like the clean design and intuitive user interface.
They have opted to have a ‘lid' which is slightly raised from the main enclosure allowing for air to flow in and out across the top, drawing heat out from the device.
In terms of read/write speeds we found that the OS itself is very quick and as it can be connected via Gigabit ethernet we found everything loaded almost immediately, a credit to the Dual-Core ARM 11 Processor and the nippy onboard memory.
When writing to the device across the network we found that the write speed was within 2 MB/s of the expected speed of the hard drive we were using, and the device sustained this speed for over 20 GB of data throughput. Silverstone have also included technology to allow you to set-up the DC01S in Raid.
While you can only install a single drive inside the DC01S it is possible to connect external enclosures via USB or eSATA and then set these up in Raid 0 / Raid 1 / JBOD configurations. As such, this does allow you to configure up to 2 TB in Raid 0 (as the largest 2.5″ drive is still 1 TB) giving you even faster performance with a large capacity.
Silverstone have certainly opted for a very full feature set, especially in terms of server duties. The Media Player, Album and My Server are all useful, although we do struggle to see how the ‘Address Book' is going to be much use when most people probably already have this on their phone, laptop and computers. The Social Network section could have been improved if it had a browser feature incorporated, allowing you to view other YouTube files.
There are many useful Media Server features that this device handles well. The built in media player does play back most media files and while it is very simple it is also streamlined and runs smoothly. It does also allow you to potentially share these files with your friends and family, although it would be nice if Silverstone had a Windows app that would automatically connect and then show you just the Media that is available – instead of logging on to the WebOS. Another useful feature, although readily available in routers, is the Printer Server feature which works out of the box without any problems.
There are however a few bugs that Silverstone have yet to iron out, several times we would enter a username with a capital letter, then press save and it would say ‘invalid username', giving no reason for it. Only through trial and error did we find out the capital key was causing the problem.
It is also a shame that they have decided to opt for 2.5″ hard disk drive support as this does limit the maximum capacity somewhat, and performance will never be as good as a 3.5″ drive. On a more positive note, the physical footprint is obviously smaller due to this.
