NAS (Network Attached Storage) drives are becoming increasingly popular and while products like the Cube Station CS407e from Synology can cost a pretty penny, for those that can afford them they are worth every last bit! Today’s review is focused on the 4-bay CS407e which as we found is much more than just network attached storage, it’s more of a storage server with a great deal of flexibility built in.
There was once a point in time not so long ago when it was rare to find a computer in the home of a typical Australian family. These days it is more uncommon to find a family that doesn’t own at least one computer. In fact, most families own two, three, even four or more computers and often they will all be networked together, sharing resources such as the Internet. Networking has become an important part of home computing and without it usability would be severely limited.
Our home network is quite large since we work from home and sharing files on the network can become quite messy. With no less than five computers over in the home office and three computers in the house, along with a HTPC (Home Theatre Personal Computer) system, sharing and backing up data can become problematic. There are lots of files that we like to share on our network which include video files, music, pictures, drivers and application installations.
In the past we have built a low-cost AMD Sempron system and set it up to share the data on two 320GB hard drives. However, the ~600GBs of formatted space quickly filled up with images, documents, music, and of course, system backups. Therefore more hard drives were installed until the standard ATX case could take no more. The next step was to remove the hard drives and transfer all our data onto even bigger 500GB and 750GB hard drives.
However, I had been reluctant to do so as I was not convinced the little AMD Sempron system was the best solution to our data sharing problem. Setting up user accounts was a pain and while Windows Remote Access can be used to eliminate the need for input devices and a monitor, it didn’t always work flawlessly. At the end of the day, I have discovered that for advanced users, there are ways around having to spend money on NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices, but not all will want to.
Therefore the AMD Sempron file server was dropped and I went back to the drawing board in search of a quality NAS device. There are actually quite a few options available, though almost all failed to meet my requirements for one reason or another. Many failed to support Serial ATA hard drives, which was quite disappointing. Others did not deliver enough performance or were limited when it came to features. Today we are going to show you one of the best four-bay NAS devices that we have come across. This product has been designed and created by a company called Synology; they call it the Cube Station CS407e.
