Archive for August, 2011

Due to a few new storage devices coming into the lab for testing recently, we have decided to finally publish our review of Synology’s DiskStation DS211j. Just to be clear before we begin, this unit was not provided by Synology but was purchased through retail for personal use. The choice to use a NAS device over a dedicated server was a tough one, but after seeing a demo of the DSM (DiskStation Manager) software we felt that this NAS device could provide the features that we needed without needing to use a full computer with a server OS. Of course, the speed of a NAS device will never match that of a home server, but for most tasks like streaming audio and video or basic file storage they are a good choice.

The DS211j is a two bay NAS that supports either 2.5″ or 3.5″ hard drives, but most users will opt for the standard 3.5″ drives for the extra capacity. The device is very small at 161mm(H) X 88mm(W) X 218 mm(D) and resembles a regular external hard drive enclosure. Under the hood, the DS211j has a 1.2GHz CPU, 128MB ram and can support up to 6TB of storage. The NAS we purchased did not come with any drives pre-installed, so we purchased two 500GB hard drives to start out. Even after picking up the hard drives, we still spent far less than a full server would have cost. The DS211j without drives will run about $199.99. Let’s check out the specs in greater detail.

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