NAS: Synology DiskStation DS-107+

In a couple of days, I am going to get this great NAS-device:

The DS107+ features a single-bay 3,5″ drive bay and I will populate it with a 1TB Western Digital drive. The WD’s have been quite reliable in the past (my PS3 is running with a 250GB Caviar drive for the last 12 months). The DS107+ features a 500MHz CPU and 128MB RAM onboard; it provides 3 USB 2.0 ports and a Gigabit connection. The NAS will be hooked up to the Belkin N1 wireless router and then act as a backup device, UPNP- and iTunes server. Movies will be streamed straight via UPNP to the PS3 and then pushed through onto the big-screen and to my Soundbar in all it’s high-def glory.

The device features some impressive performance-stats: transferring a 2GB file via Windows will take over 1 minute. Transfer-speeds: via Windows (Upload: 15MB/sec, Download: 28MB/sec), via FTP (Upload: 12MB/sec, Download: 38MB/sec)

I was originally looking at the bigger, 4-bay, CS407, but pricing is very prohibitive: The NAS in itself would cost in excess of R 5,000.00 and for a RAID-5 configuration I would have to populate at least 3 drives (at R 2,000 per TB). With storage prices dropping (and Seagate just having announced the first 1,5TB-drive) I will stick with the DS107+ until bigger NAS devices become more affordable.

The DS107+ will also nicely complement my AirTunes Express, as I will now be able to host my iTunes library on the NAS and stream directly via the AEX to my Soundbar.

I will also be able to wirelessly sync my MacBook Air and keep backups up to date. There are too many features to list, but the Download Station (allows you to remotely schedule download jobs) and the BitTorrent client are certainly amongst the ones I will frequently use.

The next thing to do: Modding the DS107+ to be able to rip and convert (my own/legal) DVD movies straight onto the NAS.