The baby has arrived – Synology DS1010+ review

It does not pay to be impatient. The longest 5 days in a while – fresh off the factory and just arrived from Taiwan:

This is probably the first DS1010+ in the country. Noise-levels are acceptable and unlike other people complained are not as loud as I thought it would be. In fact the noise is comparable with the DS107+ I am running (slightly louder due to the number of hard-drives I would say).

Setup was painless, the unit weighs in (empty) at about 5kg and has a footprint of an A4-piece of paper. Two gigabit ports, 4xUSB, 1xeSata and 5 drive bays. The drive brackets can be used to mount 2.5″ and 3.5″ SATA drives. I populated 4 x 1.5TB Seagate SATA drives and will build a Raid-5 array (gives about 4.2 TB of storage).

I installed the latest beta (DSM 2.3-1118) and the unit is lightning fast – kudos to the 1.6Ghz processor and 1GB onboard RAM (expandable to 3GB). Cant wait to see the read/write performance on the unit, which is about 120MB/sec.

Also a big thanks to Dennis @ Synology for organising the shipping for me. Importing it was a breeze (paid R 900,00 import duties). I still feel that the local distributors (you know who you are) are ripping of customers – I was quoted almost R 16,000.00 for the predecessor of the DS1010, which goes overseas for about USD 1,000.00.