I finally got the single-bay, 1TB NAS:

It took a few hours to “make” OS X TimeMachine to accept the NAS and perform backups – the steps below will outline what is necessary.

Update 2009-05-14: With 10.5.7 Apple seems to have broken the sparse-band-size, resulting in the current sparsebundle to be unmountable. Apple has reduced the band-sizes of sparse-bundles to 128MB. You can convert your existing sparsebundle via the following command: hdiutil convert -format UDSB -imagekey sparse-band-size=262144 -o new.sparsebundle old.sparsebundle

Update 2009-02-11: I have received a number of reports that large sparse-bundles (in excess of 250 gigabytes) fail to backup properly. User joar on the Synology forum has the explanation for this: “Those sparsebundle images that Time Machine uses work like this: They basically consist of a few files and one folder with all the payload files (called “bands”) in it. If the images are created automatically by Time Machine, the size of each “band” file is set to 8MB. If your backup is > 300GB you can do the math. Remember what I wrote? One folder with all the bands.”

To solve this problem instead of creating 8MB bands we will create 128MB bands (262144 times 512 bytes). You are able to convert your existing sparse-bundles via (change the max-size from 70GB to whatever suits you):
hdiutil convert -format UDSB -tgtimagekey sparse-band-size=262144 -tgtimagekey size=70g -o tempfilename.sparsebundle machinename_macid.sparsebundle

I tried the conversion of the above and it took extremely long – I eventually wiped my old backups and started from fresh. You will notice as part of this exercise that your original sparse-bundle image will be larger (in my case increasing the band-size increased the initial sparsebundle from 80MB to 1.5 gigabytes)

The installation was straight forward, but you should consider a number of steps:
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