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Synology Cube Station CS407 NAS
Quality Check
The quality of the Synology Cube Station was apparent just from its physical appearance. The extremely polished finish was a nice touch for a device which will probably end up tucked away out of sight. The physical construction and finish of the Cube Station isn’t in question. The web interface is nicely laid out. It is visually appealing and relatively easy to navigate. Items are located in such a way that you don't have to do much looking. I was impressed by the information screen, it is more than adequate. The drive status quick view, as well as the in-depth of logging is nice as well. Overall, the disk management features were nicely laid out and presented highly usable information. With that said, I did run into a few problems. Like with the privileges tab: I do like the general idea of adding and removing the users and groups by access, but using pull down lists seemed to cause problems. I managed to change the permissions on folders without realizing it several times, and at other times, failed to apply changes I wanted to make. The FTP service was seriously lacking. Not being able to manage the folders' access is a serious drawback. I would have liked to see FTP over SSH on by default. It would have also been nice to expand a RAID without losing data. This type of feature, especially if aimed at the small business and home office markets could greatly add to the Cube Station’s appeal. (Ed: I'm told by Synology that "RAID5 expansion will be available in Q1 next year.") I should mention that the Cube Station was extremely loud when copying files with a RAID 5 configuration (and only a RAID 5 configuration). When configured as a single drive, the unit was quiet, and the included hard drives were silent (Seagate Barracuda 500GB). (Ed: Synology says "About the loud noise when using RAID5, either the disk screws or back cover screws were not tightened properly.") Last, but not least, I have to mention that the web interface freaked out on me several times. This could be just a fluke from the configuration changes and heavy testing, but I don't like hangs one bit. A reboot of the device always fixed the problem, but nonetheless, it is still something I prefer not to see. (Ed: Synology claims "The hang issue should have been fixed in the recent software updates (release 462)") Overall, I can not say that these little annoyances crippled my enthusiasm for the device.
Page 1: Introduction & Features
Page 2: First Looks & Setup Page 3: PhotoStation, Download Service & Backup Service Page 4: Web Station, FTP Service, iTunes Server & Active Directory Services Page 5: Testing Page 6: Quality Check Page 7: Conclusion 
Add Comment
5 User Comments 1 - Posted by
NAS Shopper
on August 23, 2007 - 11:40 pm Thanks for the great review. I was all set to purchase a ReadyNAS NV+ until I discovered that diskless versions were no longer offered, so now I'm looking at alternatives like the cube station.
2 - Posted by
Rich
on August 26, 2007 - 10:53 pm Yes, I was impressed with cubestation. Something I think I did fail to mention in the original review is the apparent lack of SMART info from the drives. I know my ReadyNAS X6 reports this information, but the cubestation appears to be missing it.
3 - Posted by
Looking at a NAS
on August 27, 2007 - 9:05 pm I'm in the same boat as NAS Shopper, wanted a ReadyNAS until I found out I couldn't get a diskless version. Synology is a possibility.
4 - Posted by
thany
on August 10, 2009 - 9:52 am Wouldn't you say it's rediculously slow for a RAID5 box connected via Gb LAN? I mean, any modern SATA disk can easily read in excess of 80MBps, and Gb ehternet is capable of running at a practical speed of mor than 950Mbps. So I would expect transfer speeds around 80-90MBps. 5 - Posted by
Max Slowik
on August 10, 2009 - 11:41 pm Sure, /two years from now!/ Wait. Shit. Something's two years off ;)
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